100 years ago this week, feisty Time magazine began changing the news game

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.

Sign of the times? Henry Luce Foundation subsidizes Godbeat work at The Atlantic

Through much of U.S. history, newspapers and magazines were commercial enterprises where circulation and advertising revenues paid for journalism.

Times change. Obviously, both income streams are drying up in the Internet age. Cable TV news channels exist by delivering eyeballs to advertisers, but they’ve done little with complex and specialized fields like religion. (A notable TV exception is non-commercial, the “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" show on PBS.)

A future possibility is that subsidies from non-profits will largely supplant that business model. If so, can reporters to support themselves? Will substantive news reporting mean chancey freelancing, or only part-time employment, or journalism as an unpaid hobby? Will reporters lacking old-style staff jobs make their actual living from public relations work, with conflicts of interest readers are unaware of? Will print media become expensive channels reaching a small elite audience?

Such grim thoughts are roused by the recent announcement of a significant $490,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for religion coverage by The Atlantic and theatlantic.com. With this two-year grant, the magazine will hire a full-time religion editor and a second journalist with the goal of providing “the best conversation about global religion available today.”

An ambitious claim. But in its D.C.-based phase The Atlantic, at 159 years old, is the ASME’s 2016 Magazine of the Year and arguably America’s most important general-interest monthly. It has distinguished itself recently with a series of informative -- even definitive -- religion articles.