Daily Mississippian

Media Credit: Laurel Young Richard Stengel, managing editor of TIME magazine, speaks to a full crowd at the Overby Center Monday morning. He spoke of redesigning the magazine to embrace changes in the journalism industry while sticking to traditional values.

TIME Magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel delivered the third annual Stuart J. Bullion Lecture Monday morning to a packed house in the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics.

In the opening lecture of the University of Mississippi's Journalism Week, Stengel lectured on "Reinventing TIME," describing how TIME has updated its reporting style for the 21st century.

Since TIME's birth in 1923, Stengel said the magazine has come very far but needed some readjustments to keep up with technology.

Due to the abundance of information which is now available to everyone via the Internet, information is no longer "special," and having it is no longer a privilege, he said.

News is no longer just about what has happened, he said; rather, what now matters is why the event is important and why the news media feels the need to report it to their readers.

"It's not so much what happened, but why it happened and what it means, and that is the challenge for TIME Magazine in the 21st century and the challenge for all different news organizations," Stengel said.

His challenge was to find a way the magazine could break through into people's lives and show them which information is important and meaningful, he said. His answer rested on the cover of TIME. Rather than asking questions on the cover, as the magazine had done in the past, Stengel wanted to answer the questions and give a point of view.

"I felt that one way to break through in this journalistic environment, where news has become a commodity, is to basically have a point of view, have an opinion and to state it fiercely if necessarily," he said.

Stengel said there needs to be a guide through the information chaos, someone who can tell the readers which piece of news is important; aggregation is how this can be accomplished, he said.

"One of the things we do at TIME.com, which is the flip side of the magazine, is we do a lot of aggregation," he said. "We basically say, 'The best story on Iraq today is in The Washington Post or the most interesting story today is in The New York Times,' in addition to our own experts, our own writers and our own editors weighing in on those things."

Stengel said aggregation provides a universal guide to help the readers make sense of the world. He used this philosophy to reshape not only TIME.com, but the magazine as well.

Two years ago, Stengel began the reinvention of TIME, covering three major areas: changing the publication date from Monday to Friday and Saturday, redesigning the print magazine and redesigning TIME.com.

Categorizing and sectioning off the magazine was the major change in TIME's design layout, he said. Although the magazine had used this type of layout in the past, Stengel felt the staff drifted away from this idea, and he wanted to restore it so the magazine would be easier to navigate.

As for the redesign of TIME.com, Stengel said the Web site now consists of blogs and shorter stories with stronger points of view.

"Basically between those two points - online and print - we do feel as though we in a sense covered the whole waterfront, but as a guide to what's important, to what matters," he said.

Stengel also stressed the importance for the news media to take advantage of the fact that information is now accessible to just about anyone.

"The opportunity to click on the thousands of different things when you're reading one story online is just so much more enormous than that old, linear pre-digital way of information," he said. "So I do feel that the news media has to adapt to this and that there are new forms of journalism that are being created all the time. It's not having the information, it's what you do with it."

Stengel also answered questions from the audience about the digital divide and the future of print.

He said there is a still problem with the distribution of information to those who do not have access to the Internet; however, he said he does think the Internet will become as prevalent as television is today.

As for the future of print, Stengel said in order for magazines and newspapers to stay on the market, they must become more upscale and turn into items that people are proud to have in their possession.

He also warned that when reinventing a publication, there must be a balance between keeping the older traditional audience and trying to attract a younger audience.

Journalism Chair Samir Husni, Bullion's mother and his widow presented Stengel with the Bullion Lecture plaque after the ceremony.

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