--- title: TIME’s Person of the Year: Everything You Want to Know description: How the choice is made, how editors keep it a secret and why inanimate objects are eligible canonical: https://time.com/3626016/person-of-the-year-faq/ author: Kelly Conniff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-12-09T20:17:56.000Z article:modified_time: 2024-12-09T15:10:50.000Z article:section: History og:title: Everything You Wanted to Know About TIME’s Person of the Year og:description: How the choice is made, how editors keep it a secret and why inanimate objects are eligible og:url: https://time.com/3626016/person-of-the-year-faq/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt630bf32f3c964979/69876db4a988ca0d596ab45f/time-person-of-the-year-first-cover.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME's First Person of the Year Cover og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Everything You Wanted to Know About TIME’s Person of the Year twitter:description: How the choice is made, how editors keep it a secret and why inanimate objects are eligible twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt630bf32f3c964979/69876db4a988ca0d596ab45f/time-person-of-the-year-first-cover.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Everything You Wanted to Know About TIME’s Person of the Year  by [Kelly Conniff](https://time.com/author/kelly-conniff/)  ## Kelly Conniff Conniff is deputy editor at TIME. Updated: Dec 9, 2024 3:10 PM UTCPublished: Dec 9, 2014 8:17 PM UTC  TIME  by [Kelly Conniff](https://time.com/author/kelly-conniff/)  ## Kelly Conniff Conniff is deputy editor at TIME. Updated: Dec 9, 2024 3:10 PM UTCPublished: Dec 9, 2014 8:17 PM UTC  1927: Charles Lindbergh TIME **How long has Person of the Year been around**? It has a great origin story—or maybe more of a legend. At the end of 1927, the editors of TIME looked at the year’s covers and realized they had somehow failed to put Charles Lindbergh on the cover. He’d done his historic flight in May, but no cover. They decided they could get away with putting him on the cover months later by calling him “Man of the Year.” It was a stopgap. And here we are 87 years later. The challenge is that on one hand, we’re trying to make a decision about who best represents the news of the year. But the pick also needs to have archival value. You need the sense that it will stand the test of time. So ideally, we want our Person of the Year to be both a snapshot of where the world is and a picture of where it’s going. Someone, or in rare cases, something, that feels like a force of history. ([TIME Unveils Finalists for 2014 Person of the Year](http://time.com/3623703/time-person-of-the-year-2014-shortlist/)) **Tell me about the ‘for better or worse’ caveat that’s often attached to Person of the Year.** The criterion is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.” A lot of news is bad news and a lot of people who make bad news are very powerful people. TIME’s editors aren’t immune to that reality. Famously, they named Hitler in 1938 and Stalin in 1939 and again in 1942\. These were men who had a huge impact, not just in those years but over the entire century. It’s easy to stand by those choices, looking back. Arguably you could do a bad guy every year and be justified. **Earth isn’t a person and neither is the personal computer. What’s the deal with these inanimate objects?** It’s a good question. What I hear anecdotally is that readers are most satisfied when the Person of the Year is a person. Sometimes it’s been a thing; sometimes it’s been a collective. In 2011, it was [The Protester](http://www.time.com/time/person-of-the-year/2011/), a sort of representative figure. We thought long and hard about that. Could we execute it in a way that would be satisfying? Would people understand what we were trying to say? We decided that we could, and they would. I think the personal computer really stands up. Although Steve Jobs was profiled for that issue, and you could argue the editors might have been more forward-looking had they named Steve Jobs for that year, 1982. ([These Are the Most Searched Candidates on the Person of the Year Poll](http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-google/)) **Is that something you hear a lot? Why wasn’t Steve Jobs ever Person of the Year?** Definitely, particularly the year he died. To me the optimal year would have been 1984, when the first Mac came out. The 1984 Person of the Year was Peter Ueberroth, who ran the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Looking back, it’s easy to judge, but that would have been a good year for Steve. **How secretive is the process of putting together the issue?** It’s a really fun journalistic property and I think a lot of fun leaks out of it if people have a sense of who it’s going to be. We have runners-up in the issue, so there are a number of stories in the mix each year, and we have to stay flexible, given the nature of the news. Very few people on the staff know who the front-runner is, or even the short list. Really only the people for whom it’s necessary to know, know — including a small circle of editors and the writer working on the story. Layout meetings are held in secret. This is my fifth year editing it and I’ve developed a good poker face. ### See Every Person Of The Year Cover Ever  Photograph by Mark Mahaney for TIME  Portrait by Jason Seiler for TIME  Photograph by Evgenia Arbugaeva for TIME  2018: The Guardians Photographs by Moises Saman-Magnum Photos for TIME  TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers Billy & Hells for TIME  2016: Donald Trump TIME  2015: Angela Merkel TIME  2014: The Ebola Fighters TIME  2013: Pope Francis TIME  2012: President Barack Obama TIME  2011: The Protester TIME  2010: Mark Zuckerberg TIME  2009: Ben Bernanke TIME  2008: President Barack Obama TIME  2007: Vladimir Putin TIME  2006: You TIME  2005: The Good Samaritans: Bill Gates, Bono, Melinda Gates TIME  2004: President George W. Bush TIME  2003: The American Soldier TIME  2002: The Whistleblowers: Cynthia Cooper, Coleen Rowley and Sherron Watkins TIME  2001: Rudy Giuliani TIME  2000: President George W. Bush TIME  1999: Jeff Bezos TIME  1998: Kenneth Starr and Bill Clinton TIME  1997: Andrew Grove TIME  1996: Dr. David Ho TIME  1995: Newt Gingrich TIME  1994: Pope John Paul II TIME  1993: The Peacemakers: Yitzhak Rabin, Nelson Mandela, F.W. De Klerk, Yasser Arafat TIME  1992: President Bill Clinton TIME  1991: Ted Turner TIME  1990: President George H.W. Bush TIME  1989: Mikhail Gorbachev TIME  1988: Endangered Earth TIME  1987: Mikhail Gorbachev TIME  1986: Corazon Aquino TIME  1985: Deng Xiaoping TIME  1984: Peter Ueberroth TIME  1983: President Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov TIME  1982: The Computer TIME  1981: Lech Wałęsa TIME  1980: President Ronald Reagan TIME  1979: Ayatollah Khomeini TIME  1978: Deng Xiaoping TIME  1977: Anwar Sadat TIME  1976: President Jimmy Carter TIME  1975: American Women TIME  1974: King Faisal TIME  1973: John Sirica TIME  1972: President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger TIME  1971: President Richard Nixon TIME  1970: Willy Brandt TIME  1969: The Middle Americans TIME  1968: The Apollo 8 Astronauts TIME  1967: President Lyndon B. Johnson TIME  1966: Men and Women 25 and Under TIME  1965: William Westmoreland TIME  1964: Lyndon B. Johnson TIME  1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. TIME  1962: Pope John XXIII TIME  1961: President John F. Kennedy TIME  1960: U.S. Scientists TIME  1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower TIME  1958: Charles de Gaulle TIME  1957: Nikita Khrushchev TIME  1956: The Hungarian Freedom Fighter TIME  1955: Harlow Curtice TIME  1954: John Foster Dulles TIME  1953: Konrad Adenauer TIME  1952: Queen Elizabeth II TIME  1951: Mohammad Mossadegh TIME  1950: The American Fighting Man TIME  1949: Winston Churchill TIME  1948: President Harry S. Truman TIME  1947: George Marshall TIME  1946: James F. Byrnes TIME  1945: President Harry S. Truman TIME  1944: Dwight D. Eisenhower TIME  1943: George Marshall TIME  1942: Joseph Stalin TIME  1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt TIME  1940: Winston Churchill TIME  1939: Joseph Stalin TIME  1938: Adolf Hitler TIME  1937: Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling TIME  1936: Wallis Simpson TIME  1935: Haile Selassie TIME  1934: President Franklin D. Roosevelt TIME  1933: Hugh S. Johnson TIME  1932: Franklin D. Roosevelt TIME  1931: Pierre Laval TIME  1930: Mahatma Gandhi TIME  1929: Owen D. Young TIME  1928: Walter Chrysler TIME  1927: Charles Lindbergh TIME **Is it true that the announcement is made before the cover goes to the printers?** Yes, this year the announcement will be made on the _Today_ show and to TIME’s 6.5 million Twitter followers on the morning of Dec. 10, as the issue goes to press. It goes live on TIME.com immediately, and our plan is for readers to be able to download the tablet edition on the 10th as well. **Do you feel outside pressure to make a certain choice, especially with social networking and the Internet?** We invite it, because we do this online poll, which is extremely unscientific. Response to the Person of the Year issue tends to be very focused on whom we put on the cover, but the issue is also our take on the entire year in review. The poll is part of our effort to remind ourselves and readers: these were the things that happened this year and these were the people who made them happen or the people to whom they happened. Certain narratives start to present themselves just through that group of names, about business or technology or human rights or culture or politics. What’s nice about the poll is that we get an unregulated sense of who piques the public’s interest. And while we don’t make our selection based on the poll results, it’s always interesting to see where some of our preferred candidates end up. **People always seem surprised to see entertainers like** Taylor Swift **on the Person of the Year poll list. Can you talk about why pop stars are included?** TIME has always covered news in its broadest sense. Working on Person of the Year, I’ve spent a lot of time in the archives and I learned that for the first four decades of its life, TIME put a person on the cover every week. There were a handful of exceptions (a [horse](http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19340820,00.html), a [flag](http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19420706,00.html), the [city of Paris](http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19440904,00.html)), but otherwise every week you’d see person on the cover—that’s part of the magazine’s ongoing legacy. Those people are not always world leaders or presidents of the United States or CEOs. Sometimes they are Julia Child or Woody Allen or Charlie’s Angels. And some of those covers are the most enduring covers of TIME. I do think there are arguments to be made for cultural figures. They don’t impact the news in the same way a dictator would, but they certainly signal something about where the world is at a given time. If people remember 2014 as the year of Beyonce, I wouldn’t say that’s entirely wrong. **Do you have any Person of the Year choices you find inspiring or unusual?** I’ve become partial to You from 2006\. It’s a great issue. It gets a lot of flak because of the Mylar cover, but if you go back and read that issue of TIME, it’s a very strong statement about what was happening with user-generated content. I also like the “25 and Under” issue from 1966, partly because it has a great composite illustration on the cover, which is hard to pull off, but also it was a clever move to identify what would later be known as the Baby Boomer generation at that moment. **Any hints for this year?** No. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3626016/person-of-the-year-faq/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3626016/person-of-the-year-faq/"},"headline":"Everything You Wanted to Know About TIME’s Person of the Year","datePublished":"2014-12-09T20:17:56.000Z","dateModified":"2024-12-09T15:10:50.000Z","description":"TIME’s Deputy Managing Editor Radhika Jones answers your questions about how the choice is made, how editors keep it a secret and why inanimate objects are eligible","url":"https://time.com/3626016/person-of-the-year-faq/","keywords":["Person of the Year topic"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt630bf32f3c964979/69876db4a988ca0d596ab45f/time-person-of-the-year-first-cover.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Kelly Conniff","jobTitle":"Conniff is deputy editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/kelly-conniff/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt630bf32f3c964979/69876db4a988ca0d596ab45f/time-person-of-the-year-first-cover.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"TIME's First Person of the Year Cover","caption":"TIME's First Person of the Year Cover","creditText":"TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/person-of-the-year-2/","name":"Person of the Year topic"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3626016/person-of-the-year-faq/","name":"Everything You Wanted to Know About TIME’s Person of the Year"}}]}] ```