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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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there wasn't any possibility of winning the battle, the picture journalism battle against television journalism. Life had revealed the world to the public in still pictures, black and white, and color. But when television revealed the world in motion and color and instantaneous, you see it now. Life came out with the same kind of pictures a week later. You know, the game was lost. We were starting to lose money. But more importantly, we could see enormous and crippling losses ahead. So, we kept shrinking, and shrinking, and shrinking. We kept thinking of different alternatives such as fortnightly, or smaller size. We tried, we would come up with a new design, and a new budget, and a new forecast every three months, all having to be done very secretly because you didn't want the trade, the [?] trade to know what you knew because then they would abandon ship instantly. They ultimately did abandon ship.

We went through the agonizing business of having to close, and to tell people that it was happening. Then, to handle it in such a way that as few people as possible were hurt by it, i.e. we spent a year trying to place most of the staff in other parts of Time, Inc. A turnover took place, and so on. Obviously, we wanted to keep most of those people because they were very good. It was not their failure. It was a brand new scientific development that was taking place. A little bit like cable television. T.V. cable has been an enormous success. Then along comes the video cassette player and makes life very difficult for the cable business. I suppose some other technology is going to come along that will in turn make that obsolete.





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