With Tuesday’s announcement that Time Warner was looking to off up to 18 magazine titles it currently owns, some less than a decade after buying them in the first place, followed by the New York Times Co. stating that it was interested in selling the nine television stations that it owns, what’s a buyer to think?
It’s not as if they’re shedding companies and brands that don’t purely meet core competencies, at least not totally. Sure, the NYTCo does a good amount of business in print, but it was always aspirational to own a television station or nine, wasn’t it? As for Time Warner, they’re obviously in the broadcast biz, and still in the print biz, but they’re ditching out on certain areas.
In the NYTCo-related piece by Sarah Ellison and Brooks Barnes, the third graf is what’s most important:
The move highlights an issue other media companies are grappling with: While newspapers and television used to complement each other because advertising slumps wouldn’t always hit each sector simultaneously, the Internet is now hurting both, as consumers and ad dollars flee to the Web.
Complimentary was the way of a few years ago, but it looks like the Web is now swiping viewer/readership, not adding value to it. Is this a cost issue, where the Web is free for most things (then again, so is most television, except you, most of the time, have to watch the advertisements, sans DVRs), or is it the cost to produce? I’ve said a few times that if you started a New York Times-ish publication up today, with some decent capital, and only published online, you could do it for a lot less than you publish the print version for, which the change you spill out of your pocket to pay for a daily issue of is more of a token than actual payment towards what it took to print it - that’s what advertising is for. But would it truly scale down enough? Sure, you’d still need a newsroom of sorts, but you don’t need everything. In fact, you might be able to scale a lot of it out virtually.
What’d be awesome is to take a look at the backend of a situation like Engadget, which has a slew of writers, covering every new tech release, for the most part, of any note. Obviously having been a writer for a few years now on the Weblogs, Inc. network (now owned by AOL) I’m privy to some of the workflow, but having never written or been a part of Engadget I really can’t say. Is part of Time Warner’s overall thought process on how these various publications now don’t fit into their scheme of things partly, maybe even one iota, because of the Weblogs, Inc. sites that they brought in a year ago?
Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t meant to be blog triumphalism or anything, I’m just curious. It’s not every day that someone says that Parenting and Popular Science need to scoot.
