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Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Vicki Goldberg dies at 88; saw photography through a literary lens
'Goldberg,' she added, 'brought a broad education, insatiable curiosity, and relentless ambition to her work. She showed us that photography was part of our social and cultural landscape.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Ms. Goldberg had a windfall in the case of Bourke-White. In 1973, two years after the photojournalist's death, 8,000 of her photographs and other artifacts were discovered under a stairway in her house in Darien, Conn. Bourke-White had burned most of her diaries, Ms. Goldberg told The New York Times in 1986, but had 'saved everything but the Kleenex,' including menus, receipts, and Time Inc. memo pads. On one pad she'd written, 'Should I marry Erskine Caldwell?' (She and the novelist had a brief and stormy marriage.) Advertisement Ms. Goldberg pored over the trove for an article in New York Magazine and soon embarked on her Bourke-White biography. Advertisement Bourke-White was America's first female photographer to be accredited to cover World War II, a swashbuckling personage who worked for Fortune and then Life magazines. She shot Nazi rallies, and, in agonizing images, the liberation of Buchenwald in Germany. She flew in a Flying Fortress bomber to get shots of a raid on Tunis, Tunisia. She photographed a smug-looking Josef Stalin. Away from the war, she perched on a gargoyle atop the Chrysler Building in Manhattan to photograph its twin and made perhaps what is the most famous portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, sitting cross-legged with his spinning wheel. Ms. Goldberg captured her contradictions. As an ambitious photojournalist, Bourke-White was wily, opportunistic, and courageous, but she was also manipulative, doing whatever it took to get her shot, including crying on cue. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Timothy Foote, a former foreign correspondent for Life magazine, called Ms. Goldberg's biography 'an intricate and provocative portrait, as revealing as fiction, part 'Great Gatsby,' say, part 'I'll Take Manhattan.'' Ms. Goldberg's scholarship was rigorous and her knowledge expansive. Yet as a critic for the Times, where she was a regular contributor during the 1990s, her tone was light and often slightly bemused. When Madonna's much-ballyhooed 'Sex' book appeared in 1992, wrapped in Mylar, like a condom, Ms. Goldberg had this to say: 'This must be the most gorgeously, even lavishly, produced piece of junk food since Midas tried to sneak a potato chip and found his touch had turned it to gold.' In 1997, she wrote about Irving Penn, the celebrated Vogue photographer. 'Penn has spent over half a century wielding a camera against the most implacable enemies: disorder, imperfection, the distracting natural world, mortality. He has not exactly come to terms with any of these but erected what barriers he could -- a stringent sense of order to fend off chaos, a fierce devotion to a kind of photographic purity, a stripped-down sense of isolation to counter the world's insistent clutter.' Advertisement Victoria Hesse Liebson was born on July 24, 1936, in St. Louis to Alice (Schwarz) and Louis Liebson, a shoe company executive. She earned a bachelor of arts at Wellesley College in 1958. A year earlier, she had married David Goldberg, a banker. After the couple moved to New York City, Ms. Goldberg worked as a publishing assistant at Simon & Schuster and began pursuing a doctorate in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She didn't get around to defending her thesis, however; instead, she went to work as an editor for American Photographer magazine when it was launched in 1978. In addition to her son Eric, she leaves another son, Jeremy, and six grandchildren. She and David Goldberg divorced in 1973. Another marriage, to Loring Eutemey, a graphic designer and illustrator, also ended in divorce. Her third husband, Laurence Young, a professor emeritus of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died in 2021. She lived in Waterville Valley, N.H., before moving to the Manhattan assisted living facility. Ms. Goldberg was a frequent lecturer on photography and the author or editor of a number of books, including 'Photography in Print: Writing From 1816 to the Present' (1981), a collection of essays by photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and critics Charles Baudelaire and Susan Sontag. Advertisement Another book by Ms. Goldberg, 'The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives' (1991), is a lively history of the medium and its cultural impact, from daguerreotype to X-rays, moon shots, and Photoshop. Even back in 1991, Ms. Goldberg cautioned readers about the tricky nature of photography, writing, 'We could end up being more copiously supplied with news and less concerned, as well as less willing to believe the reports, than any society in history.' She added, 'These photographs walked into our lives and in some way managed to change them. So it seems appropriate to ask the questions one would ask any intruder: How did you get in? And what are you doing here anyway?' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
How TIME Inc. is harnessing AI amid 'complicated time in media'
TIME Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley joins Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi for an interview at Cannes Lions 2025, discussing what she calls the, "most complicated time in media," and why she's choosing to embrace AI and technological change rather than litigate it. Joining me now here at Cannes Lions is Time Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley. Jessica, always nice to spend some time with you in general, but of course, you're at Cannes Lions, and this is there are a lot of major moments here in the media industry. What are some of the early surprises you're hearing and seeing on the ground here? Well, it's day one, so not too many so far, but thank you for having me, Brian. It's always great to sit down and talk to you in this incredible setting, and it's going to be an amazing can with lots of conversation, and and I'm excited to be here. The one big theme, from what I've been able to tell, I've been here day and a half, it's AI, and how AI is going to change the advertising industry, but it's also changing the media publishing industry. How are you embedding it into what you do at time? Well, AI is everything and the conversation that's happening, I think, every day here in Cannes. Uh, we're really proud of everything that we've done to lean into AI. I would say our journey is in maybe chapter two. Uh, we started early in this journey, and we've decided uh to to start with a guiding principle, which was, are we going to negotiate, litigate, or do nothing? Uh, we decided that we were going to negotiate, we were going to opt in, we want to be part of this technology, part of what's happening across the media industry, across consumer behaviors. And we've done a lot of things to get us to where we are now. A lot of your competitors have taken the opposite approach. They want to litigate AI. What's your advice to them? Well, we're on our journey and our path, uh, which is Time AI. We launched that, uh, we started the process about a year ago. Uh, we wanted to create a version of time for uh agentive AI. And we actually RFP'd 12 different companies. And we landed on three finalists and selected scale AI. I know you've been covering this story with the $15 billion investment into scale. We decided to partner with scale to develop our sort of phase one of Time AI, which was a version of uh person of the year that uh scale built for us. Uh, they indexed our entire hundred years of archives and trained a private LLM. We launched with our person of the year. We knew the optics would be big with President Trump, and we went back uh and trained the model on four recent person of the years, Zelensky, Elon Musk, and Taylor Swift. Um, what does that mean? Uh, the acceleration of how consumers are demanding, um, intentionally uh finding ways of uh personalized content, multimodal content, and with the AI answer results, we wanted to again embrace it and be part of it as opposed to litigate. So the output of that was uh Time AI person of the year. You could um translate it, you could summarize. And podcast is really the audio version. So an audio version of that content. And we're continuing on that journey, uh where we'll be launching several other new initiatives with scale. Can you take us behind the scenes on some of these new initiatives? For example, I saw release from you recently an AI podcast. What is an AI podcast, and then how will AI appear on Time Inc. later this year in different and surprising ways? Well, it's really an audio version. Uh, it starts with uh training the LLM private for safety and security and protection of our IP, which is our journalism, not just of what we do today, but over 100 years. And the consumer expectation is changed and it's accelerating really fast, uh sophistication, dynamic, uh real-time results and multimodal and personalization. So really the output of our content, which we're launching with an audio version of um the newsletter, the Daily Brief, which is our largest newsletter in terms of size of audience, where we take four of the top red stories on our homepage, and we create a toolbar. And you can um listen to one story, four stories in a five minute version or in a 10 minute version. That's cool. And we were very intentional about um training the voice. So a little bit back to our history, uh, we have Henry and Lucy, Henry Luce. And a lot of uh enjoyment out of content is summarization, text, video, but audio. And we can create all of that, again, partnering with uh scale. So Time has seemed to have embraced AI, but for the other, there are a lot of other publishers not taking that route. What's the end game here? Someone has seen a lot of transitions. I think back to your Forbes day, I mean, you've worked through and managed through a lot of tough transitions in this industry. Is there some form of big shake out coming here because of this technology? Well, I can speak for time. We've embraced new formats uh our entire history. So we started as a magazine, and look where we are today. We're on we've leveraged technology that we're on every platform. We're really proud of having 60 million that engage with time across the social nets. So this is part of what we do, it's in our DNA, and we're going to continue to do it, and which is where we are are now. I would say there's there's three parts in terms of an AI strategy. The first is infrastructure. So protecting our journalism, protecting our IP, understanding who's indexing, tracking that, uh who's stealing it, how they're using it. So we have a couple partners that we signed on right away, um for that, Fox verify, uh Tolbit. And uh, second is uh content partnerships. So very early on to sign with uh perplexity, OpenAI, uh recently Alexa, Amazon Alexa Plus. And we want to uh have a seat at the table and be with these top executives. They're like our almost like our AI lab, smartest people that are building this. We want to be part of that, and we want to finally be able to monetize that. So um AI solutions through Mobian is another partner that we're working really closely with. And then the final thing that I will say is we just recently announced AI at time. And that's sort of the internal upskilling of our employees and leveraging AI across every single department, not just our newsroom, uh but legal, HR, being smarter, being faster, exploring, understanding how to use AI for our own business and our own efficiency, but also how to enhance what we're doing, not replace. You recently put out a stat, I think it was in the same release on the AI podcast. I'm sorry, I'm just obsessed with this concept of AI podcast. I'm gonna have a gig in 10 years, but anyway. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm going to have you listen to it. I'm going to send it to you so you can choose Henry or Lucy. Does it use? Yeah. It's my own, it's my own personal. Fair enough. Yeah. You said first half advertising revenue up 24%. I'm in this industry. I don't see a lot of other companies putting out data points like that. How do you explain that strength, and is it still double digit growth you expect in the back half? So that's in our uh our pivot to B2B. So when I started at time, almost three years ago now, I uh we had to make a lot of changes in our transformation. And one of the first things I did is coming from the revenue side was really double down on our B2B model. So what does that mean? Um, working directly with CEOs, CMOs, uh even chiefs of staffs of the executive suite and chief communications officers to um put together high value bespoke custom year-long programs around thought leadership and around the stories that they want to tell as a company and even as individuals. And so uh we're working direct, we're less reliant on platforms or middlemen, and it's really fueling our growth across all of the platforms, whether it's our events and I really call that live journalism, which is just an entry point, investing in the communities, AI, climate, health, and again, doing business, having ongoing conversations with the biggest brands with the biggest budgets that are household global names. And we're really proud of the results. They speak for themselves. Our pacing is up, our B2B business is up, and I think that mitigates the risk in terms of the changes that are happening with AI. And then finally, uh what we're seeing is being a part of the ecosystem, we in the last two weeks, we've had 10 million mentions across the AI answer platforms. And we're seeing those numbers grow. So if changes in algorithms impact us in terms of what we can monetize on the web page with traffic coming mainly from Google, we're able to monetize and reach audiences in new ways that they expect and demand, and that is audio. When you say podcast, I mean, there's an explosion in in getting information in a personalized way. Uh, my editor and I just were with him, Sam Jacobs. Imagine he's going out for a 50 minute run. He loves to run, he's only got 50 minutes. He's running for 50 minutes, that's pretty good. That's good. Yeah. It's pretty good, right? Slow. And he's um an SNL uh junkie. 50th anniversary had a big moment. And he wants to listen to a personalized audio version of what we've written about SNL, um not just recently in 50th, but over the last hundred years. Lauren Michaels is Time 100, he was just named in April this year. Um, he can set that, again, working with scale AI and agentive format to enjoy his run listening to time content. I just think that's one example. I am not an audio person, I'm more of a text based person, and I love summarization, I love translation, I have an ability to now chat and have that Q&A, that question and answer. So we are uh storytelling in new ways and meeting audiences where they are now. And we want to keep up. We want to keep time going strong for the next 100 years. Before I let you go, uh Jessica, you recently wrote, I think it was your first op-ed on time, uh very powerful. For those that didn't read it, um, why were you inspired to write about female leaders in the media industry and and the mentors you've had along the way? Well, thank you for that question and pointing that out. I actually pitched this story to media, and no one seemed to connect the dots or be that interested in the story, so I decided to write it myself for time. And uh, throughout my career, you mentioned Forbes, I had um incredible honor and opportunity to build sort of this entrepreneur, you know, founders, change makers, and a lot of them were female and first and young. And there's such incredible communities that exist for those types of individuals. Um, there really wasn't the same type of community for experienced leaders who have tested the time and have uh done this multiple times in multiple ways at multiple companies throughout their careers. And it dawned on me that uh, number one, we are in the most complicated time in media. No, you're right. Companies splitting up, we got Warner Brothers, CNN, and Comcast. We've got we've got litigation, we're protecting journalists. I mean, it's just it's always been a challenge, and it's always changing, but this marks um a very important moment in history. And I realized that so many of the media companies who have legacy, resilient media companies are being run by women. And I started to make a list, and it grew, and it grew, and it grew. And some of them I know, and some of them I don't know, but want to know. And I wrote the op-ed about that. And it also is this notion of the glass cliff versus the glass ceiling. And there's just too many of us to be a glass cliff moment. So read it, go to it's free. And I think it's a great perspective of what's happening in media today and who some of the leaders are. Well, keep those op-eds coming. Uh, I enjoy your writing. Uh, Jessica Sibley, Time Inc CEO, always nice to see you. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Brian, for having me. Thank you Yahoo Finance. All right, that's it for here for us here at Cannes Lions. Do stick around, much more ahead on Yahoo Finance. 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Yahoo
7 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Time Inc. CEO on embracing AI: It's better to have a seat at the table
Time Inc. CEO Jessica Sibley is embracing AI even as it's triggering a massive upheaval in the publishing industry. For the longtime media exec, it just makes better business sense to do so. "We want to have a seat at the table and be with these top executives," Sibley told Yahoo Finance at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday. "We started early in this journey, and we've decided to start with a guiding principle, which was are we going to negotiate, litigate, or do nothing? We decided if we were going to negotiate, we were going to opt in. We want to be part of this technology," she explained. Time Inc. has pressed forward with a major reinvention under Sibley, partly by leaning into AI. In 2024, it signed a multiyear deal with OpenAI to give it access to Time's 102-year-old content archive. More recently, the company said it'll launch an on-demand podcast with Meta (META)-backed Scale AI that features two AI hosts summarizing four top stories from its newsletter The Brief. Sibley said the company has been leveraging AI across "every single department" to become more efficient, from the newsroom to legal and HR. The push for cost savings comes as Time Inc. laid off around 30 staffers in January 2024 and another 22 last August. Sibley cited industry headwinds at the time for the cuts. In the fall, Time Inc. expects to enable multilingual, personalized AI interactions on the site, such as AI search, chat, and translation. "The acceleration of how consumers are demanding finding ways of personalized content, multimodal content, and with the AI answer results, we wanted to again embrace it and be part of it as opposed to litigate," Sibley said. Time Inc. was purchased from Meredith Corporation in September 2018 by Salesforce (CRM) co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in cash. Sibley began as its CEO in November 2022, joining the magazine from Forbes, where she was COO. Prior to Forbes, she held leadership positions at Condé Nast and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The publication has also expanded its high-profile events business and modernized its tech stack while continuing with its high-quality journalism. To that end, Time Inc. named Donald Trump "Person of the Year" for 2024 and followed up with a headline-making interview with the president to mark his first 100 days in office. Sibley said in a recent note that Time Inc. is forecasting 24% advertising revenue growth in the first half of the year. Other media players are navigating the tricky balance between negotiating and litigating against AI. Big Tech has been forking over large sums of money for licensing agreements to use publishers' archives to train large language models. The New York Times (NYT) recently inked a multiyear deal to license content to Amazon (AMZN) for AI-related uses, marking its first generative AI contract. The company had sued OpenAI and Microsoft (MSFT) in 2023, alleging the tech companies illegally used millions of its articles to train chatbots. News Corp. (NWS), owner of Wall Street Journal, signed a five-year licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024 worth a reported $250 million. Reddit (RDDT) is claiming in a new lawsuit that Anthropic scraped its users' personal data without consent, then used it to train its large language model Claude. As this is playing out, Google traffic to publisher websites continues to be pressured as the tech giant leans into its new AI snippets. The byproduct: shrinking news jobs. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that organic search to HuffPost's desktop and mobile websites has plunged by 50% in the past three years. Organic search traffic to Business Insider cratered by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025. Business Insider slashed 21% of its staff in late May, blaming the need to evolve the business model in the age of AI. About 6% of the Los Angeles Times staff was let go in early May, Variety reported. In January, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave 4% of its staff pink slips. Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email
CNA
09-06-2025
- Business
- CNA
From Time Inc to Discovery: Warner Bros breakup puts spotlight on checkered M&A history
Warner Bros Discovery, home to HBO and CNN, said on Monday it would split into two companies, the latest twist in its decades-long history of high-stakes mergers and breakups. Date Event 1922 Time Inc was founded by Henry Luce and Briton publication that made world affairs accessible to the average reader. The first issue of Time magazine was published in March 1923. 1923 Warner Bros was founded by brothers Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner as a film studio in Hollywood. It revolutionized cinema with the introduction of synchronized sound in films. 1969 Kinney National Company, a conglomerate that later transitioned into media, buys Warner Bros-Seven Arts and later spins off its non-media businesses. 1972 HBO is founded by Charles Dolan with backing from Time. It was the first U.S. subscription-based cable network, offering uncut, commercial-free movies and live sports, pioneering premium cable television. 1990 Time Inc merges with Warner Communications in a $14 billion deal, hailed as a "marriage of content and distribution," creating Time Warner, then the largest media company in the world. 1996 Time Warner merges with Turner Broadcasting, gaining Cartoon Network, CNN, TNT and a vast classic film library. 2000 Time Warner merges with AOL, forming AOL Time Warner, the largest merger in history at the time, aiming to merge traditional and digital media. 2002 AOL Time Warner merger begins to unravel as AOL's value collapses with the launch of an SEC investigation, prompted by allegations of accounting irregularities and inflated revenue reports at AOL. 2003 CEO Steve Case resigns from AOL Time Warner. 2004 Time Warner sells Warner Music to a private equity group led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. for $2.6 billion. 2009 Time Warner fully spins off Time Warner Cable, which had already been partially separated in 2007, ending its role in cable distribution. 2009 Time Warner spins off AOL. 2013 Time Warner spins off Time, its magazine division, which includes Time, People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated, marking its formal exit from publishing. 2016 AT&T announces acquisition of Time Warner for $85 billion. 2018 AT&T completes its acquisition of Time Warner after regulator's approval, renaming it WarnerMedia. 2021 AT&T announced it would spin off WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery Inc to create a new standalone media company. 2022 WarnerMedia and Discovery complete their merger in a $43 billion deal. 2025 Warner Bros Discovery announces it would separate into two companies — one focusing on streaming and studios businesses, while the second will house its cable TV assets.
