Life Magazine To Live Again In "See Your World" Venture

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008...8:18 AM

Life Magazine To Live Again In "See Your World" Venture

It seems to me that so much of our modern history was captured pictorially in Life Magazine. I have vivid memories of learning about many events through the pictures in Life. The stories seemed as though they came to life through these pictures. I am sure most families have old copies of Life Magazine in the attics, basements or cabinets. Many of us collected the edition that captured a seizmic and memorable event. Long before the cut and paste options of the Internet, many a kid literally cut the great photos of Life to supplement reports and term papers. Life surely was a wonderful magazine in it’s day.

As the media industry has ebbed and flowed iterating in manners to manage content, audience and monetization, and wrestling with this innovation called the Internet – Time Magazine has morphed too but has slipped at every turn. Well it is great news to learn of a plan to bring it back and doing so in a way that should fit our times.

Yesterday it was announced that Time Inc. would bring back Life Magazine as a website in a partnership with Getty Images. The new Life will be a 50/50 joint venture that will be called See Your World. The venture will leverage the Life brand and content supplemented by the extensive Getty catalog of images and expertise gained on the management and growth of the largest photo audience on the Web. See Your World will launch in early 2009 with over 6 million high quality photos and the goal is to expand the catalog by a few thousand photos per day. Users will be able to upload high quality photos though this is not intended to become a competitor to the mass market sites like Flickr, Shutterfly and others. The JV will work to preserve the high quality legacy of Life while leveraging todays vast distribution and audience participation opportunities. The JV is also contemplating other offerings like creating your own coffee table book, social networking apps, mobile apps and much more.

It all sounds great. We look forward to the roll out of See Your World in early 2009.