Investor Speculates Time Warner to Sell Magazine Unit; Is Anyone Buying It?

There's talk that Time Warner may spin off Time Inc.

Again.

According to Businessweek.com's Ron Grover, Gordon Crawford, managing director of the Capital Group (which owns 7.2 percent of Time Warner) speculated that after ditching AOL later this year, the company could unload its magazine business and focus on its "core competency" in movies and television. (Time Warner brass has not responded in print to the Crawford's statements.)

Predictably, Crawford's speculation has been grabbed by media watchers who have been wondering for months if Time Warner would sell its magazine unit.

In April, the New York Times's DealBook blog wondered if the planned spinoff of AOL meant that Time Warner "seemed to leave open the door for a potential sale or spinoff of Time Inc." In May, Peter Kafka, All Things D's Media Memo blogger, wrote, "People familiar with Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s thinking tell me he would like to spin off the publishing unit in the next year once he’s finished cleaving AOL from the company." And in June, BusinessWeek's Jon Fine asked bluntly Time Warner: Is it Time to Dump Time Inc.?

Following up BW's Crawford story, Kafka cautions, Time Warner Dumping Its Magazines? Not So Fast., and quotes "one well-placed Time Warner official as saying, "Time Warner without People? I can’t imagine it."

And why should they have to? According to Reuters, Time Inc. posted second quarter revenue of $915 million. Sure, that's down 22 percent, but it's still nearly a billion dollars.

The real question is who would buy Time Inc. Assuming the company's assets (among them iconic publications like Time and Sports Illustrated) wouldn't be sold for parts—it has 23 U.S. titles and nearly 100 in other countries under the IPC Media and Expansion Grupo Editorial brands—who has the kind of money to undertake such a huge purchase? As one can glean from the drawn-out sale of BusinessWeek (and, a bit closer to home, Condé Nast's reported McKinsey & Company-suggested budget cuts), the sort of swaggering, big-spending moguls who might have enjoyed adding a stable of magazines to their business are in very short supply right now—unless we're talking Russian oligarchs, like Alexander Lebedev, who bought London's Evening Standard earlier this year for the reported price tag a cool £1. (No word on whether it was an all-cash sale or Lebedev used the change found in one of his jets' seats.)

In fact, in his New York Times Media Equation column today, David Carr looked at (to echo a Newsweek headline from 2008) the twilight of the media moguls. Carr talked to Jonathan A. Knee, an investment banker and the co-author of The Curse of the Mogul (which was excerpted in this month's Atlantic), who tells him, "The four pillars of media conventional wisdom have not changed: First, growth at all costs; second, content is king; third, the answer to all problems is to expand globally; and finally, that by embracing convergence and the Internet, they will be able to solve all their problems."

Really, who would—or could— buy Time Inc. with these pillars suddenly crumbling?