Time Warner, whose profits now come from cable and film, has announced that Time magazine is about to be “spun off”—a phrase that to me has always conjured up a business enterprise caught in the final cycle of a giant washing machine, with desks and office machines flying through the air and middle-management types being blown away, head over heels, like so many tumbleweeds. Newsweek has ceased to exist as a print magazine. For a long time now, of course, newsmagazines have borne little resemblance to the sort of publication that was invented at Time in 1923 and loosely replicated at Newsweek ten years later—a magazine designed to present the week’s news succinctly to “busy men” who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers. Starting as strictly a rewrite operation, Time eventually had reporters and stringers around the world. They sent “files” to an operation called Time Edit, in New York, where writers, drawing on those files and the material that researchers had dug out of the library and whatever could be lifted from the Times, composed tight narratives that were conveniently compartmentalized into sections like Sport and Medicine and Religion and Show Business. That system, which for decades was the formula for producing a newsmagazine, went by a name that had the communal ring of a town picnic or a Tupperware party—group journalism.

In the early sixties, in the heyday of group journalism, I spent a year as one of the writers in Time Edit. I’d previously spent a year as a reporter (or “correspondent,” as the masthead had it) in the Atlanta bureau, covering the civil rights struggle in the South, and six months in the New York bureau—a misfit operation in the group-journalism scheme of things, staffed by two or three reporters who sometimes compared themselves to Transit Authority policemen assigned to the tunnels. For half of that year in Time Edit, I was what we called a floater—a utility infielder who was brought in to a section when, say, the person who wrote Sport was home with the flu, or when one of the World writers was on vacation. Since writers were listed on the masthead as associate or assistant editors, I’ve assumed ever since that I could justifiably refer to myself, on occasions when credentials are called out to add weight to a point of view, as the former Art editor of Time (four or five weeks, at various times) or even the former Medicine editor of Time (two consecutive weeks, although I must admit that the section was killed both weeks).

There were some enjoyable aspects of being a floater. When I settled into the desk chair of, say, the Education writer, someone who presumably pored through the education quarterlies and lunched with school reformers and kept abreast of the latest disagreements about how best to teach reading, I could feel myself imbued with the authoritative tone favored in those days at Time; I called that “instant omniscience.” I had become adept at using one of the tools employed to assert Time’s authority—what I thought of as the corrective “in fact,” as in “Democrats maintain that the measure would increase unemployment. In fact…” There were no bylines in Time then, so the readers had no way of knowing whether the Art section’s critique of the new Coventry Cathedral had been written by someone steeped in the history of church architecture or by a floater who’d moved in after a short stint in Medicine that had left him with no words in the magazine for two weeks and a more detailed knowledge of loop colostomy procedures than he’d ever hoped to have.

I liked the frequent change from section to section. In the South, my movements had been so constant and unpredictable that I’d kept a packed bag at the office. As a floater, I at least might get a change of subjects from week to week, even if I never left a building on Sixth Avenue. In 1980, long after I’d left Time, I wrote a comic novel that was set partly at an unnamed newsmagazine—the novel was called “Floater”—and I admitted in the flap copy that I was the restless floater referred to in passing as having tried to get out of an overlong stay in Religion by writing “alleged” in front of any historically questionable religious event. The senior editor whose responsibilities included Religion simply crossed out all of the “alleged”s. If there was anything Time was experienced in dealing with in those days, it was smart-alecks.

Back then, a newspaper reporter covering anything that involved Time rarely seemed able to resist the temptation to write his story as a parody of what he thought of as Timestyle—although the parodies actually tended to resemble the style used by Wolcott Gibbs, a quarter of a century before, to parody _Time’_s backward sentences in a New Yorker profile of its co-founder Henry Luce. (“Doomed to strict anonymity are Time-Fortune staff writers.”) By the time I was working in Time Edit, just about all that remained of the style Gibbs had lampooned was the use of phrases like “says he” or “said she” to introduce a quotation, plus a number of constructions that must have grown out of the pressure Time writers were under to write as compactly as possible—saving a few words by referring to the writer of a new novel, for instance, as “gap-toothed author Smith.” (In the eighties, Spy magazine, both of whose founding editors had been writers at Time, paid a sort of homage to those leftover tics by using phrases like “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump.”) It was largely because of the constant pressure to compress that Time prose struck me as more difficult to write than to parody.

A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.