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magazine, because it changed the hiring and promotion patterns that might have gotten too set under one person if he stayed too long. Anyway, eight or ten years tends to be the maximum for a managing editor. They sort of wear out after that. Not that they are not up to doing something else, but they wear out in that particular job.

Then the question of how do they get on with their particular publisher. Fuerbringer and Auer, Bernie Auer, seemed to be very compatible. Auer was an enthusiast, a promotion-minded fellow. Running a magazine is sort of--you are forever whipping, whether you're the managing editor or the publisher, you're just sort of whipping people into action. It's a continuous strain, and it's also a continuous strain--church and state--not in the sense that we were discussing so much as in the sense that when things go wrong, you find that church is always blaming state and state is always blaming church. “If only the editors could get more interesting about this or that--I don't see anything in this issue that interests me!” would be sort of a publisher's statement. A managing editor is like an author complaining about his book publisher. The book publisher never promotes his book--you've heard that one.

Well, every time anyone of our magazines goes through a sinking spell--and they all rise and sink, for a variety of reasons: they rise and sink for a variety of reasons, some internal and some competitive. When Phil Graham of The Washington Post bought Newsweek it was somewhat of a sick dog. At a certain point, somewhere in the early 70s, Newsweek got to be a very hot property. The fact that Newsweek is a hot property means Time is not a hot property, and therefore suffers accordingly in terms of circulation and in terms of