If any organization understands the definition of "revolving door," it's Time Inc. New Media. Asking someone at its flagship Web site Pathfinder "Who's in charge here?" during the past three years often elicited a cascade of responses, as Walter Isaacson, Jim Kinsella, Paul Sagan, and most recently Bruce Judson passed into, and then out of, the Time New Media managerial ranks. Sagan's departure late last year, however, apparently helped catalyze the major reorganization announced Wednesday at Time Inc.'s New York headquarters.
"I think the avalanche was probably started by Paul saying that he wanted to spend more time with his kids," says Linda McCutcheon Conneally, who was appointed to the Time New Media presidency Wednesday, while stressing that "everything is additive," and it's hard to say there was one triggering event.
Conneally says that when Sagan announced his departure last October, Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine saw an opportunity to reassess the company's new media directions. "Norm said, 'Let's think about the market, and the way we want to approach the market,'" Conneally told Wired News.
According to several sources at Time, Pearlstine, who appointed himself acting president of Time New Media when Sagan left, spent several months exploring Time's new media strategy from top to bottom. What one source described as Pearlstine's "walk in the desert" led first to the appointment of Daniel Okrent as Time Inc.'s editor of new media last fall.
And it ultimately led to what Time sources described as the most important part of Wednesday's announcement: that the dozens of separately managed new-media budgets and staffs at each of the Time Inc. magazines - including People, Fortune, Life, Entertainment Weekly, and the flagship Time - would be rolled into one operation under the command of Conneally.
"There's been a brand-centric kind of approach to this, and I'm not sure this makes sense," is Conneally's diplomatic description of this move. "I want people who are great brand stewards, but who also understand new media," she said.
The move is a staggering one for Time Inc. and its corporate culture, where the managing editors and publishers of individual magazines are accustomed to having wide latitude in deal-making. In recent years, executives at several of the magazines signed separate development agreements with online partners like America Online and CompuServe. Those agreements provided funding for each magazine's new-media department, but there was little or no overall coordination, or even communication, with the sister magazines or with Time New Media management.
Now, sources say, many of those agreements are expiring, and the online staff at each magazine will likely be forced to choose: Either go back to the magazine's print edition - if there's a job there - or move into a role at Time New Media if one becomes available.
Conneally refuses to speculate about overall changes in staffing or budget now that both will be consolidated, saying that the reorganization process will take several months, and that there is no deadline for its completion. In its statement about the changes, Time Inc. New Media said the company would be pursuing what it labeled five "initiatives" that would allow it to "manage the new media franchise more efficiently."
Boiled down, that apparently means make more money. Three of the five initiatives focus specifically on revenue, including "syndication," which is primarily online at the moment, but which Conneally said could ultimately extend to print, and even to publications owned by other companies; "title development," in other words, subscription sales for Time's many magazines; and "commerce," online sales of Time merchandise like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit video.
"As [Time Inc. president] Don Logan said to me in the past few weeks, this is not a business plan, this is an approach to business," Conneally says.
