Time-Life hired a respected civil rights journalist to lend prestige to a gossip magazine

Evidence

To run the new magazine with a measure of respectability, Time-Life chose Stolley, an in-house editor and established journalist. He’d made his reputation covering the civil rights movement for Life in the 1950s, and was also famous for having persuaded Abraham Zapruder, who’d inadvertently filmed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to sell his film to Time-Life for $150,000. But all that was now ancient history, and if Stolley had any qualms about the new venture he never showed them. In fact he apparently took to it with relish. “People never sounded downscale when he talked about it,” said a colleague. “If they thought People was garbage, Stolley would just say, ‘Well, that’s your opinion.’ ” The test issue, developed before Stolley’s appointment, tended to confirm an intention to copy the Enquirer. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 758

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of respectable institutions laundering the reputation of attention-harvesting ventures, paralleling earlier chapters on how mainstream media adopted tabloid tactics.