After nearly 50 years of publishing on a Monday morning, Time magazine will start appearing on newsstands Friday mornings at the beginning of next year, the biggest push so far by the newsweekly to make itself more competitive in a media industry dominated by the Web and 24-hour cable news.
By hitting newsstands before the weekend, rather than at the start of the workweek, Time's publisher Time Inc. hopes to make the magazine more appealing to busy readers. The move is essentially an admission -- from the country's biggest news magazine -- that the decades-old concept of a newsweekly summarizing the week's events is no longer relevant in today's fast-paced news environment. Time Inc. is a unit of Time Warner Inc.
"You want to be in the hands of people when they're ready and eager to read Time magazine, which is Friday, Saturday and Sunday," said Richard Stengel, the recently appointed managing editor of Time. "Monday morning, people's lives take off in a rush, and if they ever kick back, it's on Friday evening."
Time still has a big print circulation of more than four million, but with an aging readership, it has become less appealing to advertisers. While ad pages rose 6.5% between January and June this year, they dropped 18.4% in the same period last year.
The new publication date of the print magazine is part of a bigger effort to put more emphasis on Time.com, coordinating its output more with the magazine, Mr. Stengel said.
Mr. Stengel wants Time to be a "forward-looking magazine," says Time Inc.'s editor in chief, John Huey, providing more analysis than simply reporting the news. Time Inc. insiders say the magazine's Web site will increasingly become the primary outlet for breaking news.
"Nobody breaks news in print anymore," Mr. Huey said in an interview. "Time has broken a lot of news in the last year, and none of it was in print," he said.
The move could put additional pressure on competitors such as Washington Post Co.'s Newsweek magazine and Mort Zuckerman's U.S. News & World Report, both of which appear on Mondays.
Whether a Friday publication date will work is a matter of debate within the magazine industry. "This is something that we have been looking at since 1989," said Brian Duffy, editor of U.S. News. He said that U.S. News's research showed that people were busy with their children on the weekends. "Our readers have said they get to the end of their workweek, and they want to relax, and they don't want to think about the Middle East," Mr. Duffy said. He added, however, "if our readers tell us they'd prefer that change and if it's a strong enough majority, we'll certainly accommodate them."
Time originally was published on Fridays under its founding editor, Henry Luce, who started the magazine in 1923, but switched to its current schedule in 1960. The new timetable means the magazine will be shipped to the five domestic and eight international printing plants it uses Wednesday night, to be printed that night and Thursday morning, then delivered to wholesalers, arriving on newsstands Friday. The magazine is expected to arrive at a majority of subscribers' homes by Saturday morning, according to Time officials.
Separately, Time Warner said it would restate its earnings going back to 2000 to adjust for improper accounting. The net impact of the adjustment will be to reduce Time Warner's net income from 2000 through the first half of this year by a total of $21 million. But the company said it expects to increase its 2006 net earnings as a result of the change by $20 million, making the net effect of the restatement negligible.
The restatement follows Time Warner's settlement last year of government charges related to its accounting practices, after an inquiry related to the 2001 merger of Time Warner and America Online. As part of the government settlement, the company had to hire an independent auditor to review its accounting on 17 past transactions.
The independent auditor determined that some of the transactions weren't properly handled, prompting the restatement. A company spokesman said the restatement would be the last action in connection with the Securities and Exchange Commission settlement.
Write to Sarah Ellison at sarah.ellison@wsj.com. Matthew Karnitschnig contributed to this article.
