Mark Zuckerberg as Time Magazine's Person of the Year?

Time magazine these days doesn't tend to capture my attention much. Although I occasionally visit its website, the print magazine doesn't serve as appointment reading for me anymore; the variety of news sources that exist today, and the limits on my time, make that impossible. My disaffection with the magazine in the past several years has also been related to its misguided efforts to distinguish itself from other magazines. This has come in the form of a redesign and what has seemed like an increase in the number of pictures and graphics- at the expense of valuable text- a reader will see in the magazine.

Despite my fraught relationship with the magazine today (only as a reader of course), I have maintained an interest in its selections for Person of the Year. It defines Time and promotes the magazine the way that educational rankings make U.S. News relevant. In a dramatically changing media landscape, people do look to Time for an authoritative sense of the people who have the most influence on the events and changes in our world. The Person of the Year issue presents the best opportunity for Time to take attention away from more hip or fashionable magazines like Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, or The Atlantic. Time seemed to have forgotten that when choosing last year's Person or it wouldn't have chosen Mark Zuckerberg.