Sunday, December 17, 2006

The Origin of Time's Person of the Year

So in response to a recent comment on how the Time Person of the Year award is a lame practice, I went and checked out the history of the award. Assuming Wikipedia is correct on this, it appears that the origin of the custom does nothing to strengthen its case for relevance.

"The tradition of selecting a Man of the Year began in 1927, when Time editors contemplated what they could write about during a slow news week. Primarily, they sought to remedy an editorial embarrassment from earlier that year when the magazine did not put aviator Charles Lindbergh on its cover following his historic trans-Atlantic flight. At the end of the year, they came up with the idea of a cover story about Charles Lindbergh being the 'Man of the Year.'"

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