WHEN STEVE JOBS CAME to Time Inc. in February 2010, wearing New Balance sneakers, jeans and a black mock turtleneck, I thought about his visit to Newsweek twenty-six years earlier in that little bow tie. He had arrived at Newsweek with one assistant to help him carry two of the Macintosh computers he was presenting then. There were at least eight people with him for his Time Inc. visit, and iPads were passed out to the top editors from Time, Fortune, People and the other magazines, all of us seated at a long conference table. Coffee and tea were offered by waiters in white uniforms. Steve sat at the head of the table and spoke elliptically about innovation, quality journalism and various business models while we played with his new machines.
I had never touched an iPad, although I had been working on an app to run on one for four months. The assignment had been to create the first tablet magazine, and Sports Illustrated had done that with jury-rigged touch-screen technology pieced together from Hewlett-Packard. Finally, to show that we were ready for the coming iPad, we had made a video simulation of what SI would be like on the tablet. It was primitive, with “zombie hands” to explain the touch navigation, and I had done the narration, but the video had gone viral—we loved saying that—with more than a million views and everyone in magazine publishing had seen it.
I turned on the new iPad and went to YouTube to see if the video would play. It did: “Hello, I’m Terry McDonell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, and here’s your new issue…”
I turned it off quickly, but the editor of Fortune, Andy Serwer, asked Jobs if he had seen the video. He had. What did he think? I’m sure Serwer was pushing for an acknowledgment that as a company we were in the hunt—to use a popular catchphrase at the time. I’m also sure that most of the other editors in the room were tired of hearing about SI’s spurt of digital development and wouldn’t have minded Jobs knocking it down a little. I certainly didn’t know Steve Jobs, but I figured I still had to be on his radar and something very good could come out of SI’s iPad edition. I was hopeful.
“I think it’s stupid,” Steve said. “Really stupid.”
“Why?” I asked, jumping in, maybe too fast.
“It’s just a video—it’s not real.”
“You gave us no choice,” I said. “And our app will work great on your appliance.” I still loved the word appliance.
“You made this?” he asked, I think realizing we had met before.
At this point, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore joined the meeting. “Queen Ann,” as she was sometimes called, was full of small smiles for everyone, almost bubbly, as was her style, but then suddenly grew confused by the mood of the room. I handed her the iPad, and when she turned it on, it defaulted to the SI video: “Hello, I’m Terry McDonell…”—which was funny until she couldn’t turn it off.
“Isn’t it great,” she said, handing the iPad back to me.
The irony here was that “Queen Ann” was a shorthand variation of “the Launch Queen.” She’d earned the epithet from top management in acknowledgment of her work as the publisher of People when she’d overseen the rollouts of InStyle, People en Español, Teen People and Real Simple, giving Time Inc. a competitive edge in the women’s category for the first time. So she really had been an innovator, but now she couldn’t find the power button.
After Ann left for yet another important meeting, Serwer asked Steve about getting access to Apple’s creative process. That was a good one if you knew their history—going back to a March 2008 Fortune piece titled “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” which reported his eccentric cancer diet and raised questions about his involvement in the backdating of Apple stock options. Jobs had asked Serwer to kill it, and had then gone over his head to Time Inc. editor in chief John Huey, but Huey held the line and the piece had run.
I was expecting something far harsher than what Steve had said about SI’s iPad app, but he didn’t answer at first. I think Time managing editor Rick Stengel said something about how better access would make for more interesting journalism and he’d like to be first in line.
“That will never happen,” Steve said finally, looking at Serwer, “after what you did.” He was talking about that Fortune story two years earlier, but instead of showing anger he was swallowing hard and his eyes were tearing.
“You kicked me when I was down,” Steve said. I think that’s when everyone in the room realized how sick he was.
Serwer said he was sorry, that he was just doing his job, that it wasn’t personal. But you could see it was very personal for Steve, who nodded, took a breath and moved on haltingly to his ideas about how publishers like Time Inc. had to be careful about “overpricing what you’re selling.”
Overpricing what you’re selling? Suddenly he was negotiating, even though none of the editors in the room had the authority to do anything beyond have an opinion. So…Apple would be taking its customary one-third and holding on to the credit card data. Apple might be willing to give us some of that data back—“customers’ names and stuff”—but not the credit card info, which, he said, was protected by Apple’s privacy policy. We were fucked.
The meeting ended with the iPads being collected and Steve pushing away from the table while saying, “I’m interested in magazines.”
I HUNG BACK as the other editors filed past to say good-bye. When they were gone, I reminded Steve where we had met, and about Newsweek Access. He said he remembered, and that Tom Zito had sent him a photo from the SI 2007 Swimsuit Issue of Marisa Miller on her back on a white beach, naked except for an iPod. Was I responsible for that? I was. I had sent it to Zito to send to him, and I knew what he had e-mailed back to Zito—who had forwarded the e-mail to me.
“Really,” Steve said, and waited.
“ ‘Does she want a job at Apple?’ ” I said, quoting his e-mail.
“A joke,” Steve said.
“I know.”
“Like this meeting.”
An hour after Steve left, his top developer-relations guy called to say that “Steve and the team” really thought there was a lot of cool stuff in the SI demo and they’d love to work with us to create a version of SI for the iPad release, which was then only sixty days away.
SI was ready to go; but the first Time Inc. digital magazine—the first digital magazine, period—to run on the iPad was to be Time. Steve “wasn’t into sports,” as it was explained to me a week later, and Time had always been one of his favorite magazines. Time had agreed to put him on the cover after he made some calls himself—and it became clear that Apple’s approval was required not only to run an application on the iPad but also just to get into the Apple App Store. The leverage was embarrassingly obvious. Stengel thanked SI in his “Editor’s Letter” when the issue launched, but there was no mention of the Machiavelli Club.
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