Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes kicked off his quarterly earnings call by explaining why the company is cutting hundreds of jobs in its Time Inc. magazine unit.
But if you’re impatient, you can simply look at this grim chart, which details the publisher’s Q3 performance
Yesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.
BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.
Many newspaper publishers say the ad sales slump has stopped, but not at Wapo: Both print and Web ad declines accelerated over the last quarter. Newsweek, meanwhile, saw its ad sales drop by half.
Here’s the counterpoint to Publicis’s mildly optimistic take on the ad market yesterday: Rival ad-holding company Interpublic Group’s report, which is mildly pessimistic. But the takeaway is the same: If things get better, anyone who’s not Google won’t see much real sign of it until next year.
All the news we can’t tell you about? Most publishers can’t even get Apple to acknowledge that it’s working on a tablet, but maybe the newspaper of record has more pull. In any event, its top editor is staying mostly mum.
What’s one of the biggest names in magazine publishing worth? These days, maybe $5 million.
That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek. Next question: How many of the magazine’s employees stay on once the deal closes later this year? BusinessWeek publisher Keith Fox can’t make any assurances. But he does call the deal “exciting.”
Just in case anyone thought Time Warner had any lingering interest in NBC Universal, this ought to put it to rest: Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes just compared the proposed Comcast/NBCU deal with the disastrous one his company made with AOL nearly a decade ago.
Condé Nast, which shuttered four magazines this week, said it won’t be cutting any more titles. But that won’t be the last of its cuts: The publisher is looking to cut costs by roughly 25 percent at all the magazines it publishes, likely leading to layoffs in many cases.
Today’s example doesn’t come from a magazine per se, but from the company’s digital group, which let go of “more than” 15 people, Expect more to come from Condé, and from other publishers, in coming weeks.
Here are the long-awaited cuts that Condé Nast has been mulling: Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet and Cookie are all closing. More details via an internal memo from CEO Chuck Townsend.
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?
Google marked down AOL’s value from $20 billion to $5.5 billion earlier this year. That’s still too high, argues a JP Morgan analyst.
Heavyweight media investor Gordy Crawford–who happens to own a big chunk of Time Warner–says the conglomerate plans to dump its magazine business. But I get the sense that Jeff Bewkes and company plan on keeping at least some of the unit’s iconic titles.
There are very good odds that there are going to be some very big deals happening in the media world in the next year or so. So this move makes a lot of sense: Former Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons is joining up with Providence Equity Partners, the private equity firm with a hankering for media investments.
Is Time Inc. building a Kindle Killer? Nope.
A report suggests that Time Inc. wants to get into the hardware business and produce its own e-reader.
That’s something other publishers, like Hearst and News Corp., are actually doing or have at least mulled. But multiple sources familiar with the Time Warner unit’s thinking say that’s not the case here.
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.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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