Time Inc. has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet. Publishers like the idea. What will Apple and Amazon say?
Poor John Squires. The Time Inc. SVP seems like an affable fellow. So what has he done to deserve this impossible task–figuring out a digital strategy for Time Warner’s publishing unit? Or, to put it in Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s words, figuring out “how to put the genie back in the bottle”?
Time Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today. But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors and Time Warner executives. Will she need to make a second round of cuts?
Some Web optimists dream of a day when citizen journalists armed with cellphones, blogs and Twitter accounts will step in for Big Media. But who’s going to spend many months and lot of money tracking down a single story about a doped-up baseball player–let alone stuff that really matters?
Take a bow, J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan: You predicted that AOL would report an 18 percent drop in ad revenue for the last quarter of 2008. And it did! For your next trick: Tell us whether new AOL ad boss Greg Coleman can do anything about those numbers.
The Time Inc. CEO gets a lifetime achievement award from an industry trade group and uses it as a platform to argue for her medium’s longevity. I hope she’s right, but I worry that she’s not.
Cuts come to Time Warner’s celebrity fashion title, part of an ongoing slashing at the Time Inc. magazine empire.
And a Time Inc. veteran weighs in on the ongoing reorg (and–no surprise–the employee is not too happy with CEO Ann Moore).
Another day, another few dozen firings at Time Inc. The Time Warner publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. That brings the total body count to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year.
After asking about 100 editorial employees to give up their jobs today, Time Inc. announced a round of involuntary job cuts: Time Warner’s magazine publisher said it is firing 92 people in an overhaul of its consumer marketing and sales group. That leaves roughly another 400 positions that are scheduled to disappear in the coming weeks.
Time Inc. employees know that layoffs are coming, and this morning they were told that the layoffs will cost parent company Time Warner a bundle. Still unknown: who’s actually getting fired. That will change beginning next week, says Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges. She says the company will unveil the “size, staffing and structure of each of the business units” beginning “early next week.”
The head of Time Warner’s magazine unit doesn’t give employees more details about the coming layoffs. Instead, she delivers a pep talk version–sort of–of the reorg memo she distributed last week: Suck it up, buckle down and get to work. We’re restructuring the company because the economy stinks, but we’re still a magazine company, and don’t lose sight of that.
Time Inc. employees have a general idea of the publishing giant’s revamped org chart. But they still don’t know who’s staying and who’s going as the company prepares to can some 600 workers.
That may change after this morning, when CEO Ann Moore hosts an 11 a.m. EST conference call that a tipster tells MediaMemo is supposed to explain the changes “in detail.”
Time Inc. still hasn’t figured out exactly how many people the magazine publisher will fire this fall — the 600 number reported earlier this week, we’re told, is a guesstimate. In the meantime there are plenty of high-level org chart changes, like the departure of Ned Desmond, a longtime Time Inc. vet who was most recent title was President of Time Inc. Interactive. Click through to read Time Inc. boss Ann Moore’s goodbye memo.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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