Life Magazine: National Press
I have decided to focus my essay on Life magazine, Life was founded in 1883 as a partnership between John Ames Mitchell and Andrew Miller in an artists studio down Broadway. Miller served as secretary/treasurer and founded the magazine’s business side well. Mitchell, a 37-year-old illustrator who used a $10,000 inheritance to invest weekly into the magazine, took advantage of a revolutionary new printing process using zinc-coated plates, which improved the reproduction of his illustrations and artwork. This cutting-edge use of fine illustrations proved imperative in the competition of stiff-faced yet best-selling humor magazines Judge and Puck, which were already established and largely successful. The motto of the first issue of Life was “Where there is Life, there is hope.” The magazine set forth their principles and policies to their readers when they wrote “…we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.”
The real Life magazine was said to have started under the supervision of new editor Robert. E. Sherwood, a former Vanity Fair staffer. As a World War I veteran Sherwood tried to inject some sophisticated humor into the pages of Life, the magazine began to publish Ivy League jokes, flapper sayings, cartoons and anything burlesque. Beginning in 1920 Life took a crusade against prohibition, which made them extremely popular in the eyes of the public. The magazine began to be the house-hold name everyone was talking about. Their bravery in the face of illegal substances (alcohol, spirits ect.) and their sophisticated yet witty humor about the situations made them a liaison for conversation starters.
In 1920 Life had over 250,000 readers and counting, that was until the Jazz age entered the great depression the magazine took a large hit and lost money and subscribers. By the time Maxwell and Editor George Eggleston took over, Life had switched from publishing weekly to monthly. From then the magazine lost its standing and was slowing sliding into financial ruin with other competition rising from Balleyhoo, Hooey and Esquire. Life was pronounced a failure and came to its end in 1933.
Luckily a short time after in 1936, an investment was made by publisher Henry Luce who paid for the name of Life to be transferred onto his company then Time inc. Henry Luce believed that pictures could tell a thousand words and not just compliment a story, so he launched Life on November 23, 1936. The third magazine published by Luce, after Time in 1923 and Fortune in 1930, Life developed as the photo magazine in the U.S., giving as much space and importance to images as text in the magazine. Life remained one of the nation’s favourite magazines again and the name lived on, the magazine celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1986 with an issue fully dedicated to all the past covers of Life starting 1936 to 1970.
In 1991 Life sent correspondents to The Gulf War to investigate and capture the true essence of the War, for these issues Life took the name Life in time of War. Life was struggling financially and in 1993 they announced they would print on smaller paper starting the following year, a huge change for a company with an outstanding social value. The magazine continued to struggle in a changing world until March 2000 when the company Time inc. announced they were going to cease the print of the magazine 8 issues from the release date. This came as a shock to many as Life was present in many houses across the United States.
Lifes online presence began in 1990 as part of the pathfinder network, Life.com was launched March 31st 2009, while the archive of Life, known as the LIFE Picture Collection, was large and viewed many times, they looked for a partner who could give them the contemporary photography they were looking for. So they approached Getty Images, the world’s largest licensor of photography on the internet. The site which stemmed from this partnership offered millions of photographs from their combined collections. On the 50th anniversary of the night Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to John F Kennedy, Life.com presented Bill Ray’s iconic portrait of the actress, along with other rare photos showing they still had a valuable presence, if not only online.
Life was also taken and adapted into the new film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Ben Stiller and Kristen Wiig, portrays Life as it transitioned from printed material toward having only an online presence.
Such a large change from Life to go from copper-plated printed press of a weekly magazine to an online photography sharing centre and then to Life.com surely shows the adaptation of journalism as a whole, not all magazines and newspapers would switch to being soley an online presence but in the age of technology many have had to create one none-the-less. The list of companies who have adopted an online presence; such as a Facebook page or a Twitter account, Tumblr, Google+, Instagram just to connect with the large percentage of people who get their information from the internet now, would be endless.
True change happened for Life in 2008 when an unlikely partnership was made between Life and Google. Google, being one of the biggest search engines and globally known internet access-all phenomenon, began hosting an archive of the magazines photographs in partnership with Life to celebrate the many works added to the covers and stories by well-known photographers. The archive was home to over 6 million photographs and are all still largely available on Google’s Cultural Institute and simply by Google search.
In conclusion, Life magazine underwent many years of traditional printed press if not in such traditional methods. They were a magazine ahead of their time and dosed the public with a sense of witty, sophisticated humour that bred a generation with knowledge. They then had the sense to preserve their name and live on in a photography-based revamp, ensuring that their pages were interesting and shocking in the best ways. To then become an online archive of their past using the latest technology and partnerships with some of the biggest internet companies will surely always be known as one of the largest changes in Journalism.
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