Kelly, who has held the position for the past three years, said in an interview that his tenure at Time has been “a terrific education.” He added that he found being the managing editor too “corporate.”
“I miss running a news corporation and the day-to-day editing [process],” he said, adding that, in his current position, “[my] ability to influence a story is somewhat limited.”
The position of managing editor at Time was created in 2006 to concentrate on “standards, practices and ethics” for the magazine, according to a 2006 statement from Time Warner.
Kelly, who said he views journalism as “a passport to see the world,” first became interested in journalism after taking a class at Princeton with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John McPhee ’53.
“[It] changed my life,” Kelly said of McPhee’s class.
McPhee spoke highly of his former student, saying in an e-mail that “Kelly has been a considerable asset to everything he has been a part of.”
During the three decades he spent at Time as both a reporter and editor, Kelly had the opportunity to cover several historically defining events.
“We had 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq … We did not have a dry period,” he said.
Of all the topics he covered as a reporter for Time, Kelly said his favorite was the former Soviet Union.
“Way back in the late 1980s, we had an issue devoted to the Soviet Union and how it was changing,” he explained. “I got to work very closely with a couple of people [at Time] … We had a very nice team.”
Kelly said he also frequently encountered influential people in his work. On one especially memorable occasion, he even dined with former president Richard Nixon.
“[Nixon] asked if anyone wanted a drink, and we all said white wine. And he said ‘Well, I’ll have a martini, and if anyone else wants a martini, I’ll mix one for you,’ ” Kelly said, laughing. “Suddenly, everyone wanted a martini.”
Apart from reporting historically significant events and dining with notable politicians, Kelly also found time during his tenure at Time to return to the University this fall as the Ferris professor of journalism.
Students whom Kelly taught last semester said they found his class interesting and helpful.
“Jim’s class has been, without a doubt, one of my favorites at Princeton,” Sudeep Doshi ’10 said in an e-mail. “My writing certainly improved immeasurably in terms of being able to identify interesting people to profile, synthesizing the important information for a successful piece and translating that onto paper.”
Though Princeton does not have a journalism program, Kelly said his undergraduate experience taught him lessons of fairness and tolerance that he carried with him past graduation and into his career at Time.
“What I learned at Princeton is that … it is possible to create a community of people passionate about their subject even though their subjects are so different from each other,” Kelly said.
Kelly added that the “tolerance for every point of view” that he gained at Princeton helped him during his career at Time, which he describes as a magazine “that fosters opinion … [and] has a humanity about it.”
Kelly said he very much enjoyed the experience of teaching undergraduates at Princeton this year.
“It’s a heady feeling ... to have 15 people in a room who have no choice but to listen to you,” he explained, adding that he would “love to teach again.”
Kelly explained he currently has no specific plans for what he will do after his resignation.
“[I] plan on doing nothing, at least in the short term,” Kelly said.
Despite the industry-wide concern about the fate of print journalism, Kelly said he sees a necessity for it in the future.
“There will always be some kind of print journalism,” he explained. “People want the convenience of holding things in hand and seeing the pictures.”
The way to “ensure the continuing vitality” of a magazine is “evolving and changing it,” he added, crediting Time’s 85 years of success to its continual evolution.
As Kelly steps down from his current position, McPhee said he was confident in his former student’s ability to continue to impact the journalism industry.
“Whoever gets him can kiss the recession goodbye,” McPhee said.
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