With $40 million sunk into it by Time-Life, the new People was one of the largest investments in magazine history. Stolley was unabashed explaining the concept, “There is nothing abstract about the name. People is what we are all about.” The critical class, however, did not appreciate the beauty of that simplicity. William Safire, for instance, then a new columnist for The New York Times, wrote an essay entitled “Who Needs People?,” describing the magazine as an “insult to the American mass audience.”

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 761