Time Warner's Bewkes: We're Not Selling Mag Unit. Really.

In late September Gordon Crawford, managing director of the Capital Group, became the latest person to suggest that Time Warner could spin-off its magazine unit and focus on the company's "core competency" in the entertainment business. Many others had speculated on this in the past, but Crawford's comments, made at a roundtable at the USC Annenberg School for Communications, was less than merely academic: Capital Group controls 7.2 percent of Time Warner's stock. BusinessWeek once called Crawford "one of the media world's savviest investors."

Well, it probably won't happen. According to Crain's New York Business' Matthew Flamm, Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Bewkes has no plans to ditch his magazines at the moment. “If we can't take the leading titles people have known for decades and make them more relevant, then shame on us,” Flamm quotes Bewkes as saying at TVWeek.com's Innovation360 conference. (He also said in no uncertain terms that TW had no interest in snapping up NBC-Universal.)

This is a follow up to a couple of weeks ago when Bewkes told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg (here quoted by AOL Daily Finance's Jeff Bercovici), "Time Inc. is not for sale… People made these rumors because they want a lot of activity."

"I think the magazine business has plenty of expansion in it," Bewkes continued. If he says it one more time, will people start to believe him?