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Essayist Roger Rosenblatt pays tribute to Time Magazine on its 75th anniversary.

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ROGER ROSENBLATT: Time Magazine is celebrating its 75th anniversary, an achievement for any institution. I've written essays for Time over the past 18 years, and if I strike an inappropriate note of admiration, chalk it up to chauvinism. But even if one does not admire Time, one has to be impressed with the fact that it is the original news magazine and, thus, is looked upon as the genuine article or collection of articles. Author Kurt Anderson wrote a book called "The Real Thing" about products like Coca-Cola, Budweiser, the Ford automobile, Kellogg's Cornflakes, and, of course, Time. Very few things in life are so unlike anything else that their names become nouns. To make the cover of Time is synonymous with prominence, good and bad. To be Time's Man of the Year, Charles Lindbergh was the first in 1928, is the very symbol of prominence. Like many brainstorms, time started with the simplest notion, how did they choose the name? This is from Henry Luce's original prospectus. The name Time would be brief, simple, easy to read, and say. It is a well-known word but little used in capital letters. It is dignified for people who demand dignity and catchy enough for the general public. When Luce and Briton Hadden founded Time America was between world wars and was yet to lead the American century that Luce later envisioned. Along with that vision went an odd, sometimes combustible mixture of genius, racial prejudice, jingoism, sophistication, and a heavy portentous journalistic style that was God's gift to parodists. Time and entered a fairly world, as compared with Time today, which, like all news print organizations, has to compete for speed not only with TV but with the Internet. How does that competition affect the nature of news magazine journalism? I asked Walter Isaacson, Time's managing editor.

WALTER ISAACSON, Managing Editor, Time: Well, when Henry Luce invented the magazine with Briton Hadden, in their prospectus they said, you know people being bombarded with information, they're being bombarded with headlines, and yet they're less informed. That was true back then. It's much more true now, with the Internet, All News Radio, TV cable channels, all that sort of thing, so you get more and more news and more and more headlines quickly.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Norman Pearlstine is the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. He oversees all the company's magazines, including People, Sports Illustrated, Life, Fortune, and Money. If people can get their information from the visual media and radio, why should they bother to read?

NORMAL PEARLSTINE, Editor-in-Chief, Time Warner: Well, lots of people don't read, and lots of people do get all their information from television and radio. And while it's perhaps a declaration against interest, I increasingly look on people who read as a niche audience. It's a large niche, and it's a particularly influential and important one. And it's one that is really for people who want a level of synthesis, of analysis, of making sense of information that I think in many cases video and even radio cannot provide.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: And then the question that should be asked in the light of Princess Diana's dangerous paparazzi, and the recent hounding of Monica Lewinsky, Henry Luce used to defend the wall between church and state, between the editorial and the business sides of a publication. Has that wall crumbled, and does money drive journalism excessively?

NORMAN PEARLSTINE: There are economic pressures. Money does drive journalism. If we're not profitable, we don't have money to invest. And we have to make those judgments every day. Beyond that, I think there's also a question of getting the balance right between what readers are asking for and what we, as editors, think readers ought to know.

WALTER ISAACSON: I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: On March 3, 1923, Time came out with its first issue with Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon on the cover. The magazine cost 15 cents, consisted of 32 pages, and, another first, compartmentalized the news into 22 departments. It was intended to be read at a single sitting from the first page to the last. Luce looked it over and said it wasn't bad at all; he had invented the real thing. I'm Roger Rosenblatt.

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