Recent Blog Posts
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Death by a Thousand Cuts
Nov 20 200912:35 pm EDT -
Oprah, Exit; Exit, Oprah
Nov 20 20097:20 am EDT -
Vivendi Could Complicate Comcast's NBC Universal Bid
Nov 19 20094:08 pm EDT -
Project Everest Brings Avalanche of Layoffs to AOL
Nov 19 200910:58 am EDT -
'Reader's Digest' May Be Moving to Manhattan
Nov 19 20098:03 am EDT -
100 Layoffs Coming to 'BusinessWeek'
Nov 18 20098:43 am EDT -
'BusinessWeek' Names Josh Tyrangiel Editor in Chief
Nov 17 200911:56 am EDT -
The End of the Affair
Nov 17 200911:23 am EDT -
Window Media Closes 'Washington Blade' and Other Gay and Lesbian Publications
Nov 16 20091:53 pm EDT -
Less Than Half of 'Regular Internet Users' Willing to Pay for Content
Nov 16 200911:52 am EDT
Links
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- Jim Romenesko, Poynter Institute

- Michael Calderone, Politico

- Jeff Bercovici, AOL Daily Finance

- The New York Observer Media Vertical

- Press Box, Slate's Jack Shafer

- Memo Pad, Women's Wear Daily

- Don't Quote Me, The Boston Phoenix's Adam Reilly

- Media Decoder, The New York Times

- Media Memo, All Things Digital's Peter Kafka

- The Media Guy, Ad Age's Simon Dumenco

- L.A. Observed

- Fine on Media, BusinessWeek

- Deadline Hollywood Daily

- Tuned In, Time Magazine

- TV Tattle

- TV by the Numbers

- Gawker

- The Huffington Post Media Vertical

- Editor and Publisher

- PaidContent

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?
Matt Haber is the media blogger for Portfolio.com.





