To Our Readers

By BRUCE HALLETT/PRESIDENT

Here at TIME we regularly publish lists of superlatives, such as our project that begins next month profiling the 100 Most Influential People of the Century. Now, we're pleased to report, TIME has turned up atop a prestigious list of someone else's crafting. Adweek, a major advertising trade journal, has declared TIME No. 1 on its list of the 10 hottest magazines of 1997. TIME last graced the list in 1983, in the No. 7 spot.

Naturally, we were proud to receive this honor. But, being journalists, we were also curious about how Adweek measures heat. We learned from Eric Garland, Adweek's editorial director, that the main criteria are hard performance numbers: ad-page and revenue gains in the magazine's competitive category, and circulation gains. The advertising gains, as tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau, were collected for the past three years, with the greatest weight given to 1997.

Last year a robust economy buoyed much of the publishing industry. But TIME's vital signs were among the best in the business. Newsstand sales were up 36%. Ad pages were up 16%. Reported ad revenue was up 21%, or an extra $94 million--almost three times the gain of the other weekly newsmagazines combined. As Adweek wrote, "TIME is the category leader, hands down."

That same conclusion came through in another part of Adweek's hot-list methodology: interviews with media buyers and consultants. Page Thompson, U.S. media director of DDB Needham Worldwide and president of Optimum Media, says of TIME: "Here's a magazine that just celebrated its 75th anniversary, and for it to hit this list means something really dramatic is happening. It's livelier, more energetic and more insightful." Michael Lotito, executive director of account services for Ammirati Puris Lintas, specifically praised TIME's coverage of technology--a special interest of managing editor Walter Isaacson, whose previous job was editor of New Media for Time Inc.

Adweek editor Garland said TIME's top billing reflects Isaacson's wall-to-wall effort to "liven up the magazine." Garland stressed that "the editorial work always comes first and then translates into the marketplace."

That's a credo we at TIME share, as demonstrated by another distinction we were proud to attain last week. Three of TIME's Washington journalists--bureau chief Michael Duffy and correspondents Viveca Novak and Michael Weisskopf--won the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for their dogged coverage of campaign-finance abuses. TIME shared the prize, awarded by Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, with the Seattle Times, which published a series on toxic wastes in fertilizers.

Duffy, Novak and Weisskopf labored almost fulltime last year at the nexus of big money and politics. This was often lonely work, requiring them to pore for days at a time over cartons of Federal Election Commission and court documents, to wheedle information from reluctant sources a sentence at a time. Their persistence paid off in three dozen pathbreaking stories on campaign finance in 1997, many of which were picked up and credited by major newspapers and TV news shows.

TIME's team was the first, for example, to report that the Republican Party and its then chairman, Haley Barbour, partly financed the 1994 takeover of Congress with a curious loan swap from Hong Kong tycoon Ambrous Tung Young. TIME was first to report how Chinese entrepreneur Johnny Chung bought admission to a radio address in the White House by President Clinton in 1995. TIME was first to report the existence of more than 100 hours of White House videotapes of President Clinton at private Democratic "coffees" and other fund-raising events. These discoveries sparked congressional hearings and Justice Department inquiries.

Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Center, said, "TIME gave consistent coverage to this story; it was not a one-shot deal. TIME presented the information in a very accessible manner, making a complicated story understandable to readers." We especially value that last bit of praise, which speaks to the honor we seek every week: the interest and engagement of you, our readers.