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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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sensitive business, namely the advertising business, you have to keep your weaknesses hidden. But I would talk with Ed Thompson about the fact that it seemed to me that the figures were telling us something, and that's when we began thinking about what to do to strengthen our hold on public demand. We started with the big acts, and then we tried just about everything.

We were protected through 1956 from what turned out to be the real enemy--namely, television--because there was a freeze on the number of stations, for reasons that I have forgotten now. And the freeze was lifted in 1956, and you could tell within two or three years that television would be a more dominant force. Remember, we were a picture magazine, unlike the others. Therefore, we were the immediate target of television. Not that it was particularly targeting on us, but it was direct competition to LIFE to a greater extent, really, than it was to anybody else. And I suppose, perhaps, the least to the Reader's Digest, which is as far away from television as you can get, and still is.

So an awful lot of the discussion, probing, thinking, trying things had to do with how we could do something that television couldn't or wouldn't or probably wouldn't do, how to differentiate ourselves from them. Because the franchise we had, namely of showing the public what had happened last week, was fast disappearing. They had already seen it at six o'clock in the evening of the day it occurred. And we came out a week later with the same pictures and no movement. So that's why we went in quite a number of directions, which we thought television would probably not go in for.

Then there was also, at the same time, sort of the circulation





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