Friday, March 3, marks 100 years from the first issue date of Time magazine, self-described as “The Weekly News-Magazine.”

The feisty New York-based newcomer brought journalistic inventions that redefined what’s news and how it’s presented. When Time and other Time Inc. magazines were up for sale in 2018, an article in the rival New York Times bade farewell to “the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th Century.”

Here is a very obvious point of disclosure and personal privilege: The Guy worked there 1969-1998 as a field correspondent and Religion section writer.

Looking back, the magazine’s 75th anniversary spectacle converted Radio City Music Hall across the street into a banquet venue and invited every living person who’d ever appeared on its cover. The Rev. Billy Graham, say hello to Joe DiMaggio. President Bill Clinton, meet Lauren Bacall. You get the picture.

The current ownership, however, is low-key about the centennial. But Time’s survival is noteworthy in today’s harsh environment for print media, albeit with reduced circulation, budget, staffing and publishing frequency.

Then there is another important angle about the impact of Time in the news marketplace. News flash: Religion makes news!

Missionary Kid Henry Luce was the co-founder, and Time carried a religion news section each week, alongside other specialized “back of the book” sections like Press and Law -- subject areas that many dailies only covered with depth decades later.

Attention-grabbing Time covers, coveted real estate for all fields, added renown to numerous religious writers and thinkers (e.g. C.S. Lewis, 1947), bureaucrats (Eugene Carson Blake, 1961) and activists (Mother Teresa, 1975).

Some readers may recall one cover in particular — the much-misunderstood black-hued “Is God Dead?” Holy Week cover in 1966, written anonymously (no bylines in those days) by John Elson. This talented scribe, a churchgoing Catholic, was not undermining faith but asking whether there were any limits to the era’s “theological strip-tease” among liberal Protestants and post-Protestants. That cover was, in other words, ahead of its time.

Early on, Time broke from newspaper prose with a distinctive, hyper-condensed style memorably parodied in a New Yorker profile of Luce. “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind” and “where it all will end, knows God!” In later times, a writer like James Agee, later a novelist, could turn the report on Hiroshima into virtual literature.

Time began as a brisk rewrite of other media’s work but eventually offered original reporting from 100 correspondents in the Time-Life News Service. Stars included Theodore White, filing from China during World War II. The Rome bureau scored scoops on the exact language in the much-anticipated birth control encyclical from Pope Paul VI, and the Polish cardinal who would become John Paul II as a dark-horse papal candidate. Recent obits tell of Jerrold Schecter, who obtained and smuggled Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs out of Moscow, and David Beckwith, who established that the Supreme Court would be legalizing abortion (a forgotten exploit because his story appeared the very day Roe v. Wade was issued).

Weekly publication of the news was such an oddity that New York City’s postmaster refused Time the mail discount available to dailies so the magazine moved temporarily to Cleveland. With weekly deadlines, the magazine had the time to collate assorted daily developments into a thoroughly reported and coherent single narrative, a valuable service for example during Watergate tumult (when Time correspondent Sandy Smith was hotly competitive with the celebrated Woodstein team at The Washington Post).

Time wanted its copy to be engaging as well as informative, discarding newspaper canons as writers employed novelistic techniques and also broke the wall between news columns and the editorial page, blending in opinion based upon well-reported fact. In this era of cable “news” and Internet clickbait, such traits driven to excess — pushing past analysis — all but dominate across many platforms, sewing distrust of mainstream journalism.

Incidentally, a great source on what it was like to work at Time in its heyday is “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Communist accuser of spy Alger Hiss. His memoir is also spiritually fascinating. Then there’s the hilarious satire “Floater” by onetime Time writer Calvin Trillin (out of print but available online).

FIRST IMAGE: One of Richard Ostling’s religion-beat cover stories for Time magazine.