WHILE SOME MAGAZINE OWNERS seem focused on trying to survive in the short-term, Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and wife Lynne Benioff, the new stewards of Time, are said to be looking far into the future. “One of the first challenges Marc and Lynne gave us is to think big, really big,” Time editor in chief Edward Felsenthal told Sunday night. “Beyond the five-year plan, what will Time look like in 2040? What will it mean to people decades from now?”
— The $190 million sale is welcome news to the magazine’s staffers, who have been in limbo for the past six months since Meredith, after acquiring Time Inc., put Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money up for sale. (The latter three remain on the market.) The Benioffs left a good impression during a recent meeting with a small group of senior Time staffers, according to a source. Indeed, the couple has several attributes one would desire in a new owner: significant resources, a record of innovation, and respect for the magazine’s legacy.
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— “The power of Time has always been in its unique storytelling of the people & issues that affect us all & connect us all,” Benioff tweeted along with the Wall Street Journal’s scoop on the deal. “A treasure trove of our history & culture. We have deep respect for their organization & honored to be stewards of this iconic brand.”
— The Benioffs’ acquisition is a personal investment, rather than tied to Salesforce. They now join a growing list of billionaires who entered the news business in recent years by scooping up iconic brands, following Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post), Laurene Powell Jobs (The Atlantic) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (The Los Angeles Times). The Post greatly expanded its newsroom under Bezos, while the Atlantic and Los Angeles Times are in the process of doing so now.
Good morning and welcome to Morning Media. You can reach me at mcalderone@politico.com/@mlcalderone. Daniel Lippman (dlippman@politico.com/ @dlippman) contributed to the newsletter. Archives. Subscribe.
“WHY SUFFER THROUGH THE ANNIHILATION if it’s not going to matter?” Christine Blasey Ford reasoned in August after deciding not to come forward with an allegation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh from when the two were in high school. But as a “bare-bones version of her story became public” last week “without her name or her consent,” writes the Washington Post’s Emma Brown, Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, decided to speak out.
— The Post first learned of Ford’s accusation in early July. Ford contacted the paper through a tip line when Kavanaugh’s name appeared on the Supreme Court shortlist, according to Brown, who also described Ford’s reluctance to make the claim on the record as she “grappled with concerns about what going public would mean for her and her family.” Ford also approached her congresswoman, Democrat Anna Eshoo, in July with the allegation, according to the Post report. Ford later sent a letter through Eshoo’s office to Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
— The Intercept reported last week on the letter to Feinstein, and news organizations began following up on the allegation, which Kavanaugh denies. Recently, Brown writes, “Ford had begun to fear she would be exposed, particularly after a BuzzFeed reporter visited her at her home and tried to speak to her as she was leaving a classroom where she teaches graduate students.”
— The erosion of privacy, along with what Ford considered to be inaccuracies in the coverage, prompted her to come forward, according to the Post story. “These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” Ford said. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”
— POLITICO’s Burgess Everett has more on the fallout from Kavanaugh’s accuser coming forward.
BUZZFEED EDITORS RESPOND: “To clarify our mention in this piece: through the course of regular reporting, BuzzFeed News had attempted to speak with [Ford] prior to news of the letter breaking,” tweeted Washington bureau chief Kate Nocera. “She declined to comment.”
— Editor in chief Ben Smith added: “From our reporting (like the Post’s) there’s nothing to indicate the timing was calculated. Last Monday she clearly didn’t want to tell her story to a reporter. Then whispers of the letter leaked into public. That’s important because Republicans are focused on Democrats’ tactics. I don’t see any evidence that somebody other than Ford herself made the decision to tell the story in public.”
“PHOTOJOURNALISM NEEDS TO FACE its #MeToo moment,” Vox visuals editor Kainaz Amaria told NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro. While the news business overall has faced a reckoning this past year — and CBS, especially, this past week — “the photojournalism world has largely been absent from the #MeToo conversation,” according to the report on “Weekend Edition Sunday.”
— Amaria described being paid less, “overlooked on assignments” and “groped and intimidated in the field” in a workplace dominated by men. “Eighty-five to 90 percent of the news imagery that we consume is created by men,” Amaria said, noting that 90 percent of the images published last year on the front page of the New York Times were shot by men.
— MEANWHILE, TWO PROMINENT MEDIA MEN who lost their jobs following misconduct allegations returned this past week in prestigious publications. Former “The Takeaway” host John Hockenberry, who has been accused of sexual harassment and workplace abuse, wrote nearly 7,000 words on his “Exile” in Harper’s. And former Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who was acquitted of sexual assault but has faced widespread misconduct accusations from more than 20 women, wrote “Reflections from a Hashtag” in the New York Review of Books.
— Slate’s Isaac Chotiner conducted a tough interview with Review editor Ian Buruma, who defended publishing Ghomeshi’s essay. “The exact nature of his behavior — how much consent was involved — I have no idea,” Buruma said, “nor is it really my concern.”
TODAY: “All Of It,” a new two-hour WNYC talk show hosted by Alison Stewart, launches today at noon. Guests this week include Ani DiFranco, Edie Falco and Sally Field.
TONIGHT: It’s the primetime Emmy awards. Full list of nominees here.
HILLARY CLINTON ADDRESSES DEMOCRACY ‘IN CRISIS’: In The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton writes: “The administration’s malevolence may be constrained on some fronts—for now—by its incompetence. But our democratic institutions and traditions are under siege. We need to do everything we can to fight back. There’s not a moment to lose.”
NEW YORKER PROFILES HUCKABEE SANDERS: Paige Williams takes a deep look at White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a profile published this morning. The piece includes Williams sitting in on a session in Sanders’ office before a July briefing, alongside White House figures such as Raj Shah, Hogan Gidley and Bill Shine.
— “Sanders often appears to mistake journalism for stenography or cheerleading — she sometimes tells the media what to ‘celebrate,’ such as the state of the economy,” Williams writes. “Sometimes, when confronted with the fact that reporting is often adversarial, she reflexively mentions courtesy, seemingly not understanding that journalism is an exercise in democracy, not etiquette.”
JUST AS PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP CALLS news he doesn’t like “fake,” the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns report how “conservative-leaning voters” in a recent study conducted by the Trump-aligned America First Action “routinely dismissed the possibility of a Democratic wave election, with some describing the prospect as ‘fake news.’”
MATTIS AVOIDS SPOTLIGHT: The New York Times’ Helene Cooper looks at the “fraying” relationship between President Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who “has assiduously avoided the limelight during his tenure because he is fearful, aides said, about being put on the spot by questions that will expose differences with his boss.”
— Mattis “has batted down multiple requests from the White House to go on ‘Fox & Friends’ to praise the president’s agenda,” Cooper writes. “And he has appeared before reporters at the podium in the Pentagon press room only a handful of times, giving remarkably few on-the-record one-on-one news media interviews — one of which was with a reporter for a high school newspaper in Washington State who had obtained Mr. Mattis’s cellphone number.”
NYT WALKS BACK HALEY STORY: The New York Times admitted Friday to creating an “unfair impression” that U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was responsible for buying $52,000 curtains for her residence when, in fact, the purchase was made during the Obama administration. An editor’s note atop the story by Times state department correspondent Gardiner Harris notes, “The article and headline have now been edited to reflect those concerns, and the picture has been removed.”
— Before the Times tweaked the article, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi writes, “The misleading context provided ammunition to those who perceive the news media in general, and the Times in particular, as hostile to Trump and his administration.” And Harris tried to dodge scrutiny, with Farhi noting that the Times reporter “hung up when reached for comment” and then “did not respond to follow-up messages.”
— Times executive editor Dean Baquet, however, did respond to Farhi. “The main lesson here is, if we get it wrong, we correct it,” he said. “We own up to it.”
REMEMBER THE NYT PUBLIC EDITOR? The Times’ handling of the curtains story prompted some media watchers to recall how the paper axed its public editor position last. “Used to be the public editor would get to the bottom of this and find out how such a damaging error was made,” wrote NYU professor Jay Rosen. “Now, leadership’s position is that people on Twitter will figure it out, and discuss it and see we don’t need that person empowered to get answers anymore because social.”
WHAT ABOUT A TWITTER PUBLIC EDITOR? Rosen posed that idea to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a conversation published by Recode, suggesting someone “like a Margaret Sullivan, somebody who’s empowered to listen to complaints that users are having, get answers from the company.” Dorsey said he liked “the idea of it,” though didn’t commit to it.
WATCH: Bill Geist reflected on his 31 years at “CBS Sunday Morning” as he retires. His son, NBC’s Willie Geist, responded: “Charles Kuralt convinced him to join the show in 1987 by saying, ‘It’ll be fun.’ Man, was it. Congrats, Dad!”
REVOLVING DOOR
Joe Stephens has been named founding director of the new journalism program at Princeton University. An award-winning investigative reporter, Stephens spent nearly two decades at the Washington Post.
Sam Grobart, formerly with CNN and Bloomberg, is joining Quartz as editor for premium journalism. Sam starts this Monday.
Blair Guild, most recently an associate video producer and politics reporter at CBS News, is joining the Washington Post’s video department as a breaking news and viral video editor.
Time magazine has made several hires, including Judy Berman (television critic), Tomi Omololu-Lange (associated producer, enterprise and immersive experiences), Mark Hokoda (copy editor), Gina Martinez (reporter on the news desk), Annabel Gutterman (associate audience engagement editor), Kat Moon (associate audience engagement editor) and Abhishyant Kidangoor (associate producer in Hong Kong).
CONGRATS: Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace was awarded the “Tex” McCrary Award for Journalism by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society on Friday night.
— Twenty-eight media organizations took home Online Journalism Awards at the ONA conference in Austin, including the Marshall Project, ProPublica and the Washington Post. Full list here.
EXTRAS
— The Knight Foundation and the Lenfest Institute are putting $20 million into a fund for local news, reports Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt.
— Condé Nast International president Wolfgang Blau tells the New York Times’s Elizabeth Paton about the magazine giant’s “transformation.”
— The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan talks about covering fashion.
— Scott Nover asks in the Atlantic who is left covering Brooklyn as big newspapers scale back local coverage.
— The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng wrote Friday how “after a long period of ignoring the site, Trump now publicly loves Breitbart again.” On Saturday, the president tweeted an “exclusive” Breitbart interview with his son, Donald Trump Jr.
KICKER
“Here’s to the new owners being enlightened custodians of a great American and global brand whose voice still matters.” — Former Time managing editor Richard Stengel
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