Actual Time Inc. Layoff News: Plans Unveiled, Slowly, Starting Next Week
by Peter Kafka
Posted on November 5, 2008 at 1:26 PM PT
Time Inc. employees know that layoffs are coming, and this morning they were told that the layoffs will cost parent company Time Warner (TWX) a bundle. Still unknown: who’s actually getting fired.
That will change beginning next week, says Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges. She says CEO Ann Moore (right) and her lieutenants will unveil the “size, staffing and structure of each of the business units” beginning “early next week.”
Unfortunately, that still doesn’t mean that Time Inc. workers will all learn their fate at the same time. A person familiar with the plans tells me the re-org could take a couple weeks to roll out.
Also fuzzy: The number of people who are going to get cut. The 600 number The New York Times reported last month is a ballpark estimate, I’m told. Time is telling individual unit managers to reduce overall payroll, but they’ll have autonomy to make the cuts themselves.
A reasonable but completely unverified hunch: People who work at SI.com, People.com and CNNMoney.com may be in better shape than their colleagues. Those three sites were singled out as top performers during Time Warner’s earnings release this morning, in which the company said the magazine publisher’s overall revenues had dropped seven percent and that ad sales had declined eight percent in the last quarter.
Know more? Let me know: peter@allthingsd.com.
