International Herald Tribune
05-18-2006
Jim Kelly, who has been managing editor of Time magazine for more than five years and last week won the national magazine award for general excellence, is moving upstairs in the Time-Life hierarchy to the newly created position of managing editor for Time Inc., the company has announced.His successor, who will become the 16th managing editor in the magazine's 83-year history, is to be announced this week. The person was said by one Time executive to have ''great EQ and great IQ,'' meaning the candidate ''is both a first-class intellect and has a first-class temperament.''Time Inc. has undergone a broad restructuring over the last several months, cutting scores of jobs and focusing its energies on the Internet, which has posed a special challenge to newsweeklies.Time is still the biggest of the weekly news magazines, with a circulation of more than four million, but it has been slowly leaking readers over the last few years. Newsstand sales, one measure of a magazine's health, have been declining, accounting for just 3.7 percent of the magazine's circulation last year; in 2001, they represented 5.3 percent.Also, Time's ad dollars and ad pages are down sharply. Ad dollars dropped 14.7 percent from early 2005 to early 2006, while ad pages were off 16.8 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.Kelly's new job was announced on Tuesday by John Huey, editor in chief of Time Inc.''For those interested in the real story, Jim and I began serious discussions about his future and Time's future at a lunch last November,'' Huey wrote in a memo to his staff. ''At that time, I expressed to him my belief that his skills would translate perfectly into the new management structure I envisioned for running the editorial operations of this increasingly complex company.''Huey said he wanted Kelly, who will move into an office next to his on the 34th floor of the Time-Life building in Midtown Manhattan, to concentrate on standards, practices and ethics. He will also be in charge of crisis management and outside recruitment as well as what Huey called ''pro-active policy making and prepublication vetting of controversial stories.''Kelly, 52, won not only the award for general excellence at the magazine awards but also the award for a single issue for Time's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.He said that in November, Huey had given him a choice of staying as Time's managing editor for two more years or graduating to senior management.''I said sure,'' Kelly recalled Tuesday, even though he said he enjoyed the journalistic aspects of his job.''I love picking the cover and discussing the news every day, but this other job has different kinds of pleasures and I found it intellectually engaging enough to take John up on his offer.''Traditionally, managing editors of Time have held the job for eight years. But recently they have served about five years. Kelly said he was the longest-serving managing editor since Ray Cave, who held that title from 1977 to 1985.
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