PEOPLE'S PREMIERE

Henry R. Luce, talking about his first magazine's interest in personalities, once commented: "TIME didn't start this emphasis on stories about people; the Bible did." This week Time Inc. takes its co-founder's thought a large step forward by bringing out PEOPLE, a new magazine based on the old journalistic precept that names make news. Says Managing Editor Richard Stolley: "We're getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be in it. Our focus is on people, not issues."

The weekly's 72-page premiere issue is crammed with names, some famous (Queen Elizabeth, Sam Ervin), some unsung (Air Force Major Thomas T. Hart, one of the 1,300 Americans still missing in Viet Nam), and some neglected (Marina Oswald is the major biographical subject). An interview section presents a conversation with The Exorcist Author William Peter Blatty. "Out of the Pages" features an eerily prophetic excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle describing the arrest of a man in Moscow. Black-and-white or monochrome pictures illustrate nearly every story; some items run at around 60 words, and the upper limit for most stories (except biographical pieces) will be 1,500 words.

Work on PEOPLE began last spring with a small staff recruited by Otto Fuerbringer, TIME'S former managing editor, now editor of the company's magazine development group. A test issue marketed in August in eleven cities sold 85% of the copies distributed. That positive response spurred the decision to begin regular publication this week. PEOPLE'S full-time editorial staff of 34 is comparatively small for a weekly magazine. There will be some freelance contributions, and the magazine has assembled a network of 35 stringers.

With a cover price of 35-c- and an initial press run of 1.4 million, the magazine will be sold at newsstands, supermarkets and other retail outlets. The decision not to promote mail subscriptions was largely prompted by the increases in second-class postage now being imposed by the U.S. Postal Service. The first issue carries 20 pages of advertising; page rates are $4,550 for black and white, $5,800 for color.

With its lavish use of pictures and its breezy tone about personalities, PEOPLE is bound to remind some readers of other Time Inc. publications. Stolley, 45, a former assistant managing editor of LIFE, cautions against instant analogies: "PEOPLE is not a reborn LIFE in reduced size, and it is not the People section of TIME stretched to 50 editorial pages." What PEOPLE actually is should become clearer with each new issue, but Stolley foresees no problem in establishing the magazine's identity: "There is nothing abstract about our name. People are what we are all about."

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