WHY A MAGAZINE GIANT WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH TIME AND FORTUNE: Meredith tries to navigate a collapsing business by dropping news-driven prestige titles in favor of lifestyle and celebrity magazines like Happy Paws and People.
When Meredith acquired Time Inc. last year, it quickly spotted the problems: Time magazine, Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated. The titles had the richest history and greatest prestige, but they depended on news content easily found elsewhere. Meredith didn’t see a way to change the downward trajectory, so it put them up for sale, with little nostalgia.
People magazine, on the other hand, was a situation. It was highly profitable, but reflected all the stresses on modern publishing, including substantial declines in print advertising and newsstand revenue, and insufficient online ad growth. Meredith saw a powerful brand that wasn’t fully capitalizing on its unparalleled access to celebrities. It had valuable exclusive material—from Hollywood stars to human-interest stories and true-crime tales—and there was room to bring in more money.
It’s a practical approach: Invest in assets with the promise of profit growth; don’t waste money trying to fix hopelessly weak ones, no matter how strong the romantic attachment.
Time magazine’s buyers certainly put a happy face on their acquisition last year: Time Magazine To Be Sold To Billionaire Couple For $190 Million.
“We’re pleased to have found such passionate buyers in Marc and Lynne Benioff for the Time brand,” Meredith president and CEO Tom Harty said in a statement. “For over 90 years, Time has been at the forefront of the most significant events and impactful stories that shape our global conversation.”
In a memo to the magazine’s staff, Time’s editor in chief, Edward Felsenthal, said he was “thrilled” with the news.
“From the first moments we sat down with Marc and Lynne to discuss Time’s future, we knew that this was not just a meeting of minds and business goals, it was a confluence of purpose,” Felsenthal said.
He added that the Benioffs had told him to “think big, really big,” and envision what Time will look like in 2040.
Will it still be a weekly print news magazine in supermarkets and dentists’ offices? Now an anachronism in the era of blogs, Twitter and 24-hour cable news, Time magazine hasn’t been Time magazine since its center-right founder Henry Luce died in the mid-1960s and the publication became an increasingly less essential cog in the endless DNC-MSM echo machine. Let the dinosaur finally die.