Sam Jacobs in a lengthy informative and educational conversation on AI, Print, Social Media, and the TIME 100 franchises.

Imagine stepping into a time machine — intentionally or not — and landing in 1923, the year Henry Luce and Briton Hadden founded TIME magazine.  That’s exactly how I felt when my Zoom screen lit up for an interview with Sam Jacobs, the youngest editor-in-chief of TIME magazine since Luce himself.

The first book I read as a journalism student in the United States was The Intimate History of Time Inc. The story of TIME’s founding captivated me — two ambitious Yale graduates, bursting with vision and drive, determined to create a magazine that would explain the world to busy people. That same energy and curiosity I once read about in Luce and Hadden felt alive in Sam Jacobs. This conversation felt like a full-circle moment.

Sam isn’t just passionate about TIME’s legacy — he’s actively shaping its future. He is leading TIME in a direction that would make Luce and Hadden proud, balancing the challenge of engaging younger audiences while remaining loyal to long-time readers. Under his leadership, the legacy brand is not only surviving in 2025 but thriving — arguably more dynamic and relevant than ever.

We talked about AI, and Sam’s approach was refreshing: use it where it adds value, but don’t let it replace the human editorial judgment that has defined TIME for a century plus. Print still matters, he reminded me.

Of course, we couldn’t speak without discussing TIME’s iconic Person of the Year. Sam walked me through the editorial thinking behind naming Taylor Swift as the 2024 honoree. And yes the cover of TIME remains one of the most coveted spaces in journalism.

So please, without any further ado, join me in this informational, educational, and entertaining interview with Sam Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief, TIME.

But first the soundbites…

On how TIME uses AI: “We think about it in several different ways, first and foremost as an area of coverage. We’ve focused on AI two or three years ago; we launched the TIME 100 AI list and community.”

More on how TIME uses AI: “We’re really trying to focus on the people behind this technological transformation that’s always been TIME’s strength is to focus on people.”

On how TIME journalists use AI: “It’s certainly our journalists use tools that are powered by AI to make themselves more efficient.”

More on how TIME journalists use AI: “We also use ChatGPT or something like Claude as a thought partner, as someone who has spent years staring at magazines that have no words on them and trying to figure out what words to put on them. It’s very useful to have someone to talk to, which isn’t to say that they’re writing the lines, but it’s saying, OK, well, what are some expressions that involve this word?”

On the role of TIME in the age of AI: “The strong brands figure out a way to hold on to their value, hold on to their heritage, find new audiences, use new distribution mechanisms.  I’m really excited about the potential for TIME’s trusted journalism to provide guidance to readers and users all around the world instantaneously in multiple languages and multiple formats. I think all of that is powerful.”

On whether AI is a thief or a curator: “The answer is very likely both. I wouldn’t say any company. Certainly, we can track and see which bots are crawling Time.com. I can see every day how many different companies are coming through and scraping TIME.”

On the role of the cover of the printed TIME: “The important thing is that there’s no more valuable real estate in media than the TIME cover, that people continue to covet it, that the connection to the print magazine gives a huge amount of credibility and authority.”

On the role TIME 100 franchises play: “It’s a big driver of our live events business, our journalism, our live journalism business. And that is a big thing that we’re leaning into. We’ve moved from about three or four live events a year to now maybe close to 35.”

On having 45% of his audience below 35: “The people creating the journalism are in touch with the people in their lives and are creating journalism for people that appeals to people in their lives. Of course, TIME’s audience is intergenerational, and I hope it always is. We’re always trying to go from the kid in the classroom all the way to the grandparent who wants to talk about the world with that grandchild.”

On what he tells someone wanting to start a new magazine: “I think it’s a terrible thing to work in a profession and tell people that they shouldn’t be doing your profession. It’s something that I think it’s important to get people enthusiastic about what we do.  There are tons of interesting models right now.”

On any think he likes to add: “I feel so lucky to be at this place. This month is my twelfth year at TIME, and I’ve been editor now for more than two years. And I think we all just feel lucky to work at a place that means so much to so many people.”

On what he does to unwind at the end of the day:  “I do a lot of reading. I am an atypical magazine subscriber. I probably get 12 or 15 different magazines, watching Netflix and trying to catch up on TV shows. Love to go running in my neighborhood here in Brooklyn.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Everything. You know, the world is a complicated one to cover.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Sam Jacobs, editor-in-chief, TIME.

Samir Husni: My first question to you, your CEO Jessica Sibley in a press release last week embraced AI on so many different fronts at Time Inc. but mentioned at the end of the release that the content of TIME will continue to be produced by the editors, reporters and writers at TIME. 

Can you tell me, is there any role AI plays in the creation of the magazine, the website, the digital, the newsletters?

Sam Jacobs: Samir, this could be like an hour-long conversation just about AI, but I appreciate it. We think about it in several different ways, first and foremost as an area of coverage. We’ve focused on AI two or three years ago; we launched the TIME 100 AI list and community.

We’re really trying to focus on the people behind this technological transformation that’s always been TIME’s strength is to focus on people. Obviously, for the first three decades of the magazine, you had a person on the cover every week and we have these big franchises like TIME 100 and Person of the Year. We’re trying to use those storytelling strengths to focus on the people behind artificial intelligence.

So that’s first and foremost as an area of coverage. And I think that there’s an opportunity for TIME to be one of the most successful, if not the most successful communicator to large audiences about what AI means for people’s lives and to be a bridge between the decision makers in this field and the general public. I look at every economic transformation tends to have a publication that captures that moment.

You could go back to The Economist in the 19th century, Fortune in the 20th century, our former sister title. You can look at something like Wired when you have this information technology transformation. And so certainly our aspiration is for TIME to be considered the publication that really gets this moment from a coverage perspective.

Obviously, then there’s a question of how does TIME as a company use AI and how does the newsroom use AI? It’s certainly our journalists use tools that are powered by AI to make themselves more efficient. I occasionally, if I were really good at math, I wouldn’t gotten into this job, I do find that when I have to do things like budgets and planning, using AI as a check on, well, am I forecasting this right? Am I seeing it right? That is super helpful.

I interviewed Lisa Su last year, the CEO of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) at our Yearend TIME event, and I was trying to figure out basically if you invested a thousand dollars in Lisa Su’s company before she became CEO, what would that be worth today? If you type that in as a Google search, the results are terrible. If you type that into Claude, the results are quite wonderful. And so as a tool to augment my ability to do my work, it’s helpful.

We also use ChatGPT or something like Claude as a thought partner, as someone who has spent years staring at magazines that have no words on them and trying to figure out what words to put on them. It’s very useful to have someone to talk to, which isn’t to say that they’re writing the lines, but it’s saying, OK, well, what are some expressions that involve this word? There are ways in which as a as a pattern recognizing language generator that AI can be super helpful. And then obviously it moves up and down our business.

Our legal team uses it for certain things. Our technology team, etc. I think the power for AI at TIME, and I would say for all of the media right now, is really as a distribution mechanism and as a discovery mechanism.

For our business, we’ve entered into a number of partnerships with different AI companies, more than a dozen now, but pretty much every major player in this space, TIME is either in conversation with or has come to an agreement with some kind of partnership. If you are using Perplexity, if you’re using ChatGPT, if you’re using Amazon’s Alexa, you’ll be able to find TIME’s journalism there. I think that’s important for TIME to be at the forefront of where users are finding information.

Obviously, TIME has navigated several different transformations when it comes to distribution of our journalism. Think back to delivery of the magazine, entrance of the website, the arrival of social media, the arrival of the iPad. We can go through all these different ways.

And Samir, you’ve covered this across your career where people are consuming magazine media. I look at our forbearers and I hope that each time they had an opportunity to say, I want TIME to be excellent in this new format, that they seized that opportunity. And I think AI presents a similar opportunity for us at this moment.

I also think about the power of AI for discovery. There are huge limitations to the ways in which any organization can present original information. If you look at the tool we built for Person of the Year last year, I think it’s a good example of where we want to go.

I Think where the industry is going to go. So that was a tool that allowed you to ask questions about Person of the Year articles, allowed you to have conversations with it in different languages. And when I think about the potential for discovery where we can publish a great original story, let’s say, I was lucky to go to the White House to interview Donald Trump a few months ago.

We published the transcript. We published a feature story. We’ve got a fact check of that conversation.

That is immediately limiting who that story is accessible to. It’s only in one language. It’s only at a certain length. That’s only in one format. And for me to think, what would be possible for that to be translated into multiple languages? For you to be able to have a conversation with TIME’s Archive about we’ve written thousands of articles about Donald Trump, but they’re not all there in that screen on that phone. For you to be able to interrogate TIME and say, well, what did he mean when he said this? And we could say, well, immediately you can create a response that is grounded and based on our journalism, that is sourced in our factual, trusted journalism.

We’ve always been moving TIME through different form factors, through different audiences. And I feel like AI is this amazing tool potentially to accelerate that transformation. I think about, TIME for Kids, right? This is taking time journalism and presenting it at a different grade level to a different audience in a different format.

That’s not an extension, an amplification of TIME’s journalism. And I think AI as a delivery mechanism is powerful for us. I recognize that media’s biggest challenge and magazines have always been that we don’t ever own our distribution.

We’ve talked about digital as something that disrupts print, right? Well, in print, you own the distribution. Of course you don’t. There’s a printing press. There’s a postal service. There’s the newsstand. There are all these economic forces like this year we were looking at the possibility of tariffs against Canadian paper, which is what most magazines print on.

There are all these disruptive forces when it comes even to reaching that dedicated audience or people think something like email. Well, email is great. It’s a direct way to reach the consumer.

Well, you and I know, of course, it’s not that if Gmail or Apple or Microsoft make a certain decision about how they’re going to present information, you completely lose touch with that. And there are all these different partners and players in every ecosystem. For me, AI is just another example of how can smart, successful media companies figure out how to navigate this new transformation? It’s complicated.

It’s new. But you’ve watched this over your career. I’ve watched it over mine.

The strong brands figure out a way to hold on to their value, hold on to their heritage, find new audiences, use new distribution mechanisms.  I’m really excited about the potential for TIME’s trusted journalism to provide guidance to readers and users all around the world instantaneously in multiple languages and multiple formats. I think all of that is powerful.

And I think it’s also consistent with our history.  If you go back to the original issue of TIME that came out at a moment when there’s so much information in the world. Four hundred newspapers across New York City and a couple of 20-year-olds said, well, what if we just put that all into a smart package that you consume it as you want to consume it? I see AI as just a sort of another step in that transformation.

Samir Husni: Do you think that what you and your editors are creating is being stolen by AI?  Is AI a thief or a curator?

Sam Jacobs: The answer is very likely both. I wouldn’t say any company. Certainly, we can track and see which bots are crawling Time.com. I can see every day how many different companies are coming through and scraping TIME.

We know which ones are licensed partnerships and which are not. And I would encourage, as an editor, all companies that work in this information space to properly pay, properly cite, properly support an information ecosystem. I think we often look to the music industry as an example of one where there was this massive technological transformation that really harmed the content creators.

And that industry was able to find a way back to now in a world where we have lots of successful musicians who are compensated through their work. Is it the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago before Napster and Spotify, etc.? No, but there is now a thriving ecosystem. And I hope there’s a future for journalism where we are paid fairly.

It’s hard to imagine what type of content you’re going to be getting from an AI interface if it’s not dependent upon a constantly refreshing source of information created by newsrooms like ours. And I think we should be fairly compensated for that work.

Samir Husni: You create now more than one cover on your digital website. Last week there was three covers, one on the Democrats, one on Are You Human, one on a Broadway actress. How do you select which one of those covers make it to the print edition?

Sam Jacobs: There are very few covers, Samir, that are not printed. Occasionally we produce a cover that is digital only because of a news cycle reason.

We’re printing 10 days from now. The news is happening now. It’s going to take another 10 days potentially for that to reach you in your home.

It doesn’t make sense for you to be getting that cover at home 20 days later. We’ll produce it online. But most of our covers are printed and then they’re distributed through newsstand, through direct mail.

You can buy it through a seller online or across the world.  I would say, 5% at most of our covers right now are truly digital only. Everything else is printed in different geographies.

And this has been true for the entire time I’ve been at TIME and certainly the entire history of TIME. We’ve thought about distributing the cover by geography. Now I think about it more as topic and vertical and be able to tell more stories.

The important thing is that there’s no more valuable real estate in media than the TIME cover, that people continue to covet it, that the connection to the print magazine gives a huge amount of credibility and authority. And frankly, the fact that it’s a limited resource. There are only going to be so many TIME covers produced every year.

I think that gives it a lot of power. I can tell you lots of stories about what it means to be on the cover of TIME. But right now, we’re producing, frankly, fewer covers than we did when I started.

So it’s actually a more select, more exclusive piece of real estate than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

Samir Husni: You’re creating more franchise issues. You started with the Person of the Year in 1927, then the TIME 100, and then TIME Health and TIME Business. How are those verticals working with the mothership?

Sam Jacobs: They work well. Person of the Year and TIME 100 are two of the strongest franchises in media. Person of the Year is going to turn 100 years old in a couple of years from now.

TIME 100 is now 21 years old. They truly have become the gold standard when it comes to influence on the news and recognition for ability for people to move the headlines. We’re now taking that framework, that way of thinking, and moving it to different communities, to different verticals that we think are going to shape the future.

It’s a big driver of our live events business, our journalism, our live journalism business. And that is a big thing that we’re leaning into. We’ve moved from about three or four live events a year to now maybe close to 35.

People want to get together. Coming out of COVID, people want to be together. And I think people crave TIME’s curation.

You talk about something that AI can’t do. It can’t do the type of work we can say, well, these are the 100 people who are the most influential people in health. That requires a huge amount of historical knowledge, relationships, conversations.

And I don’t think yet the technology can recreate that with our editorial spin, with our focus. We’ve been successful at building these different communities. I think for a long time, the magazine was the central relationship between the reader and a publication like TIME.

And now, as magazines understandably have fallen out of some people’s weekly lives, certainly not yours and not mine. But we need to create new ways for people to connect to brands and new ways for people to connect to titles like TIME. And my hope is that for lots of people out there seeing TIME 100 AI as an entry point to understanding what’s happening in that field and all the other ones we’ve created, that this is a useful new way to understand the world.

Samir Husni: Were you surprised, or it was on purpose that almost 45 percent of your audience now are under the age of 35?

Sam Jacobs: I’m not surprised. It is on purpose. You always need to reach new audiences.

I think about that not just in terms of age, but in terms of interest and geography and lots of different ways we can think about that. We’re very successful on social media. We have 60 million followers across our different channels.

There are people on some of those channels, they skew lower in age than others. There’s a big audience there that is a younger audience that is receiving TIME’s journalism all the time. And a huge part of our organization is in that age group.

The people creating the journalism are in touch with the people in their lives and are creating journalism for people that appeals to people in their lives. Of course, TIME’s audience is intergenerational, and I hope it always is. We’re always trying to go from the kid in the classroom all the way to the grandparent who wants to talk about the world with that grandchild.

It’s important for brands to find these new audiences. It’s exciting that a brand, as old and revered as ours means something to this new readership.  I saw that perhaps most startlingly or most visibly when we named Taylor Swift Person of the Year.

 I heard back from my sister-in-law that our niece, who was nine at the time, was passing around a copy of TIME magazine with her friends and they were reading it on a sleepover. That is the power of print media. That is also showing that when we cover the right stories, they can appeal to audiences of all ages.

We’re constantly looking at new ways. We’ll launch a new franchise in July that’s thinking about a younger audience as well. We’re always looking to appeal to these different groups.

Samir Husni: I remember telling the New York Times that from a marketing point of view, it was a genius move.  It sold over 200,000 on the newsstands compared with the usual 50,000 or 60,000 copies. Sam Jacobs: It was very successful. Obviously, she’s a cultural juggernaut.

I also would point out a couple of things. She gives very few interviews, and she gave the first interview in four or five years to TIME. What I thought was very interesting about that moment, Samir, is when I went on TV to talk about, this is the Person of the Year and went around media giving interviews about it, everyone said, oh, well, you had to pick her.

 I have to tell you that when we got together in the summer and said, well, wouldn’t it be interesting if we see if we could make Taylor Swift Person of the Year? Well, we can’t do that. It doesn’t make any sense.

She’s an entertainer. You know, Person of the Year should be president. It should be Elon Musk.

It did not fit inside of our typical understanding of the framework for who belongs in that designation. But by the end of the year, it became obvious to everyone. And that kind of journey is a very satisfying one to go on.

Samir Husni: The question that I must ask is, did President Trump Person of the Year sell as much as Taylor Swift?

Sam Jacobs: I would have to come back to you on that. Of course, we’ve done a lot of covers on President Trump and some have sold very well. But for us, the metric on the newsstand is just one, right? The newsstand now is a small piece of our business.

It’s much more about how much coverage are we getting? Are we driving the conversation? Are we getting picked up in other media? Is it helping increase our impact and credibility? There’s a whole mosaic of metrics that I would use to judge the success of something.

Samir Husni: If somebody comes to you and said, Sam, I want to start a new magazine. I just graduated from college, and I have this magazine idea. Help me. What do you tell them? Are you out of your mind or go away?

Sam Jacobs: No, I think a print magazine is an expensive proposition, right? And it’s a hard thing to move into. But I think you and I have both seen stories of new magazines that have started in the last few years that have been incredibly successful. I would encourage them.

I think it’s a terrible thing to work in a profession and tell people that they shouldn’t be doing your profession. It’s something that I think it’s important to get people enthusiastic about what we do.  There are tons of interesting models right now.

What’s interesting is to see some of the new media players who have started up in reaction to traditional media and legacy media over the course of time, their modes of delivery, their models, their presentation starts to resemble the thing that they were rejecting in the first place. You know, there’s something wonderful about what a magazine does by bundling together different voices, by providing news or information across multiple cadences. All of that can be very hard to recreate in a Substack.

But what we’ve seen over at Substack, which is great, is that they’re trying to recreate the emotions that we have in magazines.  Let’s have multiple columnists and conversation together.

Let’s do video. If you like this person, maybe you like that person. I mean, that’s what a great magazine does is introduce you to new ideas, new people, new forms of storytelling.

To me, there’s lots to be excited about.

Samir Husni: Well, I know I must respect your time, but before I ask you my typical last two questions, is there any question I should ask you that I did not?

Sam Jacobs: You tell me. No, I think I couldn’t be more excited about where TIME is today.

I feel so lucky to be at this place. This month is my twelfth year at TIME, and I’ve been editor now for more than two years. And I think we all just feel lucky to work at a place that means so much to so many people.

Samir Husni: If I come to visit you one day in your home unannounced one evening, what do I catch Sam doing to unwind from the day’s work?

Sam Jacobs:  Oh, God.  I do a lot of reading. I am an atypical magazine subscriber. I probably get 12 or 15 different magazines, watching Netflix and trying to catch up on TV shows. Love to go running in my neighborhood here in Brooklyn.

I feel very lucky to work in a job that reflects my interests, I’m curious, I want to know more about the world, I want to hear different perspectives, and so that’s often how I’m spending my time.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Sam Jacobs: Everything. You know, the world is a complicated one to cover.

Our industry has always been challenged, but it’s challenged today. Trying to figure out a way to create journalism that has impact, that supports a sustainable business is something that would keep anyone up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.