Blogs and Stories
A Short History of Perks at Time Inc.
Sean Thompson/AP
The publishing company has gone from charter planes, drink carts and comped membership in the Rainbow Room to vending machines and—say it ain't so—no free Snapple.
For much of the twentieth century—the American century, as Time’s founder, Henry Luce, dubbed it—Time Inc. was the world’s most successful and powerful publishing company, and its employees were the among the most richly rewarded. The pay was good, but the perks were legendary. Now in the middle of laying off 600 of its 7,000 U.S. employees, after firing hundreds more in the last few years, it's cutting back those lavish expense accounts. Here, some memories of the way things were.
"I used to say when I would pass a particularly lavish house in foreign capital, ‘That’s either an Arab embassy or the home of the Time Inc. bureau chief.’" -Calvin Trillin
1950s
Dick Stolley, who started his decades-long Time Inc. career at Life in the 1950s (he’d later buy Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination for the magazine for $150,000 before going on to start People magazine): “We would rent planes and that sort of thing. The famous story is about a photographer who submitted an expense account during Second World War, and the picture editor looked at the expense account and cabled back, ‘You have $300 for taxi fares in April, and during that period you were on an aircraft carrier.’ And his mythical response was, ‘It was a very big aircraft carrier.’ That is the best story I ever heard, though it’s probably not true. And of course there was the drink cart, and the food being delivered. This was in the old building, 9 Rockefeller Plaza, where we were until 1959. I don’t remember the drink cart so much in the new building. On closing nights, which for Life back then was Saturday, first a cart would go by with wine and liquor, mixed drinks. Then that was followed by a French meal, from a French restaurant directly across the street. They would load up these special carts, with receptacles for the food, to keep it warm, and they would come by and feed you. This was a closing night ritual, first the drink cart and then the food.”
1960s
Calvin Trillin, a Time correspondent in the South in 1960 and ’61 before coming to New York to work as a reporter and then writer for the magazine: “In the South, I was not in the high-on-the-hog expense thing. One of my expense items, I remember, was ‘After-prayer-meeting snack, Tuskegee, $3.75.’ I also had an expense once, ‘Pants ruined in racial disturbance, $22.50.’ And then somebody said to me, ‘Put it down as a lunch.’ That was a good phrase. I tried out for a while to see how outlandish I could have the lunches be. At one point I had lunch in some dismal part of Mississippi with Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general of the United Nations. Who I think was dead by that time. They didn’t care. I used to say when I would pass a particularly lavish house in foreign capital, ‘That’s either an Arab embassy or the home of the Time Inc. bureau chief.’”
1970s
John Manners, a writer and editor at Time-Life Books in the 1970s and ’80s and Money magazine in the ’90s: “You were part of a little club. And the perks to membership were the expenses, the parties. It was generally thought that coming to work ought to be fun, and it was part of management’s job to make it fun. They expected you to work hard, to get your work done, to stay late if that’s what it took, to work on weekends if that’s what it took, but in return you got all those perks and generous vacation—I had five weeks my first year.”
1980s
Brian O’Reilly, longtime writer and editor at Fortune: “I used to commute to New York from the Princeton region with a writer from Time magazine, back in the early 1980s. Back in those days, Time Inc. would let you just turn in the little tab at the bottom of a restaurant bill, the area that was perforated and you could tear off. You could write in any amount, and they'd accept it. When the company finally cracked down on that, this writer friend from Time told me he had to take his daughter out of private school and send her to the local high school.”
1990s
Alison Rogers, a reporter at Fortune in the early 1990s: “Word was that John Curran, a top editor who ran the Fortune Investor's Guide, got special latitude with his expenses. And once he took us all to lunch at La Cote Basque. Because the Investor’s Guide that year had done so well. So often, even though they were over-the-top expenses, they were bonuses in a way. It wasn’t, ‘Everyone gets to go to La Cote Basque.’ It was, ‘John gets to take people to La Cote Basque, because his particular special issue did so well.’”
2000s
Joel Stein, staff writer at Time in the late 1990s and early 2000s: “I somehow got them to pay for my Rainbow Room membership. Free breakfast every day over at the top of 30 Rock. I think I just sort of snuck it in. I don’t think there was a rationale at all. And then my Friar’s Club membership I also expensed. There was some rule that may have been true, or we have made up, that it was OK to expense lunch if we took each other out. Not every day, but often. It would be, ‘Not anything good in the cafeteria? Let’s go out and have a ‘business discussion’ and expense it. It was outrageous. When I left the staff, I was sad to say goodbye to all my friends there, but the really hard thing was giving up that AmEx card. I gave it a little funeral, and I was crying over it.”
Priscilla Painton, writer and then high-level editor at Time, 1989-2006: “The culture of Time expense accounts was always wildly exaggerated—at least in the last eighteen years, when I was there. But there was a period recently when the free Snapple was taken away. There were a whole bunch of things taken away, but for some reason people focused on the fact there was no free Snapple anymore. It hit hard, for reasons that were symbolic.”
What were your favorite Time Inc. perks? Former employees can feed The Daily Beast in the comments below.
Jesse Oxfeld, a senior editor at New York Magazine, has covered the media business for Gawker, Editor & Publisher, and Brill's Content.
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Jessie has only scratched the surface, and I encourage my fellow alumnae to share their favorite expense account moments. Here are two of mine:
In the late 80s Jim Gaines took the entire staff of People magazine to the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo as a reward for a banner year. At the resort, we were handed credit cards to cover all drinks, facials, massages, schooner trips, etc. Some legendary fun ensued.
Around the same time I was trying to arrange an interview with Imelda Marcos, who was at Doris Duke's estate in New Jersey. Because we didn't want to get caught in rush hour traffic, I had a helicopter waiting on the West Side -- that's when I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore.
I worked at HBO at the Time and Life building in the late seventies till 81. The "education" reimbursement was amazing. They paid for my gym membership, and I recall taking voice lessons for a while--and they paid for those, too. You could take a peer to lunch and expense it--and I was a very, very junior staffer, just out of college. It was fabulous.
Cry. Me. a. River.
Try working in a job where there AREN'T perks. Hard to believe, I know, but 10s of millions of Americans do it every day.
I wish you would make this into a Time cover story, so its readers can see just how pampered, entitled and shallow journalism can be.
It must be noted not everyone got to write off their Rainbow Room memberships. Joel got away with murder because he was one of the young boys that managing editors took a strong interest in pursuing. They were the ones who got to go to Hawaii for ad sales retreats, the ones who "covered" gourmet restaurants and celebrity chefs, the ones allowed to write seven-page stories about nudist camps, the ones given boodoggle assignments to exotic areas. One guy got sent to Australia to write a puff piece cover on Russell Crowe (Bet you didn't know Crowe was "grand and generous"..."a good singer"..."he loves performing.") The same writer got a sweet promotion and a huge (read: enormous) raise after a Time higher-up developed an intense romantic obsession with him. But, as Lou sung, "some of us have to work."
I'm not sure how many of my colleagues even knew about the free in-house medical care. In the 1980s I was going to Indonesia with my generous Time Inc. vacation weeks, then the next year to China. Before I left I went to the Time Inc. infirmary and got immunizations against all the nasty possibilities - typhoid, hepatitus. And a supply of malaria pills.
Most people knew at TIME how lucky we were, at least the younger crowd, not the old boy network, which was so toxically present. They just felt entitled. Luckily though, I was able to take advantage of the glory days in the '70s. Time paid 100% for my MBA from Columbia. They even paid for my driving lessons!! And yes, there were the "cocktail carts" on closing nights and the town cars to drive you home at midnight. Ironically, despite all this, within the first month of my joining Time, editorial went out on strike for a couple of weeks. I remember my shift was 12AM-6AM. Even the women from Times Square, if they weren't busy, came over to walk around the building with us carrying our picket signs. Yes, those were the glory days and surreal to think about now. The beginning of the end was a few years ago, when everyone got gift certificates to the Container Store as bonuses!
in the mid-80's Time paid for all educational expenses of employees. Latitude was broad. Every Wednesday, 5:00 p.m, I'd leave my Sixth Avenue office, drive (in my company car) to Westchester, and take horseback riding lessons.THe lenient expense account policy, allowed any Time, Inc. employee to take out another TIme, Inc employee for breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, cocktails...As outrageous as the policies appear, the policies were established so employees would develop relationships and hopefully share ideas;Looking back, it was the most productive period of my professional life. Idea sharing, collaboration, teamwork were all hallmarks of those years.Another perspective---bonus were slim, salaries mediocre, perks generous; salaried employees worked long hours, six-seven day weeks, and traveled extensively. The perks made up for the lack of a life outside of Time.
In the year 2000....
http://www.observer.com/node/43128
...it was a relief to hear that the editorial staff of Entertainment Weekly , which just got back from an four-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Puerto Rico, managed to live up to their Time Inc. forebears. The trip was a special treat in honor of the magazine's 10th anniversary.
"It was the best morale booster," spokesman Sandy Drayton said of the trip. "There was good clean fun had every day."
Put up in the Wyndham El Conquistador Resort & Country Club, EW staffers begged off from organized activities like an outing to the rainforest and shopping in Old San Juan in favor of laying by the pool, drinking (their bar tabs were covered, thank you), and losing money (their own, not Time Inc.'s) at blackjack tables in a nearby casino.
And in the spirit of the good time had by all, several staffers-from an editorial assistant to managing editor Jim Seymore-spent some quality time in a hotel hot tub during the junket's last night.
"He was calling for more bourbon," one writer said of Mr. Seymore....
booooring. anyone with opinions prior to 2000 have no use here. they all lived in a bubble anyway. my lst company was very much the same way, so for you insular journalist types: it was not just Time Inc. been here ten plus myself and i can assure you that even with the loss of some perks (lunch anywhere, no black cars to take me home, etc. it still is a great place even in tough times. and many perks still exist that still exceed most other employers.
My favorite fringe benefit was the countertop soda machines all the titles had during the mid-to-late '90's. Diet Coke on tap - now there's a perk.
The off-site trips- I got to go to New Orleans (pre-Katrina of course) and Laguna Beach and stay at gorgeous places. At the time I would have preferred better compensation or a bonus instead, but looking back those trips were great for team building and brainstorming for special issues & re-designing the mag.
I worked at Time Inc. for 10 years in advertising sales. One of our favorite games to play was "Miss America". At a sales meeting, for the then alive & well LIFE Magazine in NY, we all gathered at Morloni & Porcheli (sp?). There must have been at least 40 of us drinking, eating, smoking and just having a blast - then the bill came. That's where Ms. America came into play.
All of the sales people and sales managment (or anyone who had any access to expenses) threw thier cards in to a big bowl. They had the restaurant manager stand on a bar stool and pick the credit cards our of the bowl...40th runner up is....until you got down to the last credit card which unfortunatly for them was "Ms. America" and they had to pay the bill which was probably a couple of thousand dollars. That was one game you didn't want to win.
One of the great perks in NYC was the private cab rides home, no matter how far away you lived, if you worked past 8 PM. We also got dinner on closing nights and often took other staffers out to lunch, although you typically put down a 'source' on your expense report. Some of the most creative writing I did was on my expense report. When I worked in LA in the 90s, we used to expense lunch at one place so often that we just referred to it as 'the cafeteria.' It was the ad side, however, that really had it good. Their whole lives were expensed--literally!
Fortune once had a division meeting in a castle in Ireland. they took our measurements before we left and we had custom, hand knit, Irish wool sweaters waiting for us when we arrived.
but these are all kind of genteel stories. there were much wilder things going on back in the day.
Oh God. what is the big deal about the free cab rides home or free town cars? By the way, a lot of magazines had town cars to take you home late night until very recently - and so they should have when you've been closing an issue at midnight. they also had free pizza and beer or soda for the staff - is that a no-no "perk" too?
the only real perk is a private jet - and those days are gone for many for a long time to come....
Even freelancers made out like bandits. Fortune flew me to NYC to interview with all the top brass, from John Huey on down, before signing me to a contract. My expenses were often more than the fees I received for stories. I wrote four stories in a row that required trips overseas -- one trip for just three days when a staff writer backed out of an assignment. In each case, an editor told me, "Don't ride in the back of the plane" meaning I was to book business class tickets. I accumulated enough frequent flier miles for two first-class tickets anywhere in the world on British Airways, and stayed in English castles and four-star hotels in Italy, Germany and Belgium. Some of these trips ran into five figures, but no one blinked an eye.
As a writer who travelled a great deal, I was once summoned to the executive editor's office to be told that I wasn't spending enough money. Specifically, I wasn't entertaining my wife on my expense account between trips. "Office business" was a perfectly acceptable reason to dine, expensively, with fellow staffers. Airplane itineraries would be routed as desired to visit friends or relatives. We stayed in the best hotels and entertained in the best restaurants. Of course, one could argue that this kind of lifestyle gave us a cache that helped us do our jobs better and attract the best talent.
The best story is (true) about the well-known Life photographer who was allowed to expense a pick-up truck for an assignment to photograph wild horses.
The 'edit retreats' in the '90s were the best. In addition to the entire People staff getting to go to the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, where we were so out of control (midnight golf cart races) that we were banned from ever coming back, there were other trips to Aspen and Laguna Beach, where we devised important editorial strategy, like to 'avoid cliches like the plague.'
Time Inc. staffers still have the best vacation and health bennies in the industry, so if one is lucky enough to still be on staff, one can't really complain. (though it is fun to reminisce about the good old days!)
BUT, the recent layoffs were obviously, reprehensibly, and fairly openly meant to strip employees of said benefits. Managers I know were told to offer the laid-off staffers their same positions, but as freelancers. Essentially, they were instructed to fire seasoned (read well compensated & often 50 aged) employees and bring them back the next day as freelancers.It makes my skin crawl. Black cars and expensed lunches? Fuhgetaboutit.The good old days are gone.
Time Inc. is bound to see yet another DOL class action suit in the near future. But rest assured, the consultants and bean counters ran the calculations, and ultimately, it's all about tomorrow's stock price.
My favorite Fortune story.... A brilliant, but thirsty editor would take a group of us out to lunch. Where he had to write down the names of his guests on his expense report, he put down the names from Dicken's Oliver Twist. Good times. Good times.
Thank you.
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