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fact television is now in trouble.

If anyone would ask me what TIME's competition is, I would say it's the newspapers. The newspapers have steadily, year by year, learned to do what TIME and Newsweek do, but do it in a daily form. If you look at the New York Times, and most other papers have copied it, it's coming very close to being a daily magazine. That's real competition. It's got national circulation now. Then you have the Wall Street Journal, that has national circulation. Now you have USA Today that has national circulation. The forms of competition are continuously changing. It's a question of recognizing exactly what it is you're competing against. Most of the bad judgments made occur because you mistake your competition--you think it's one thing when in reality it's something else.

Do you think that in the 1970s the people at TIME were too focused on Newsweek? Is everybody here always focused on Newsweek?

They got terribly focused on Newsweek, yes. There was always this terrible fear that Newsweek would sort of catch up with them. There your question about LIFE may have some validity, in that they wanted to keep enough air between TIME's circulation and Newsweek's circulation.

Did they worry about competing editorially with Newsweek?

Oh certainly.