JACK GRIFFIN NAMED CEO OF TIME INC.

Succeeds Ann Moore, Who Is Retiring After 32 Years at Time

NEW YORK, August 9, 2010 – Time Warner Inc. (TWX) Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes today announced the appointment of Jack Griffin as Chief Executive Officer of Time Inc.

Mr. Griffin will succeed Ann Moore when he joins the company at the end of September. Ms. Moore, who is retiring after 32 years of service at Time, will remain as Chairman through the transition, after which Mr. Griffin will also assume that role. Earlier this month, Mr. Griffin left the Meredith Corporation where he had served as President of its National Media Group.

In making the announcement Mr. Bewkes said: “I am delighted that Jack is joining Time Inc. He is an exceptional executive who knows how to expand the reach and relevance of strong publishing brands, and he will be a champion of our high-quality journalism. As CEO, Jack will further advance our lead position in the industry and accelerate the expansion and innovation of our titles on all platforms.”

Mr. Bewkes continued: “On behalf of all our colleagues, I want to thank Ann Moore for her 32 years of distinguished service at Time Inc. She has made so many contributions over that period, including launching some of our biggest brands and diversifying our advertising client list, and, most recently, advising me on recruiting Jack. And she has done a remarkable job of leading the company over the past eight years, a challenging time in publishing. Ann has also been a visionary in digital, leading the industry to innovate across all emerging platforms. And through it all, she proved to readers and advertisers that there is great value in both the old and the new publishing formats.”

At Meredith Mr. Griffin nurtured and aggressively expanded the company’s titles while also creating highly successful advertising and marketing programs. He played a significant role in helping acquire publisher Gruner + Jahr USA, overseeing its integration into Meredith Corporation, which doubled the size of its magazine business.

Mr. Griffin said: “I am honored to join Time Inc., the world’s pre-eminent branded content company. Time Inc. has a strong culture of excellence and leadership, and I look forward to working with the great team there to continue moving the company forward. It is a great privilege to follow in the footsteps of my friend and colleague Ann Moore, who has done so much for Time Inc. and the industry.”

Ann Moore said: “I have believed for some time that Jack is the right person to be the next CEO of Time Inc., and I couldn’t be more pleased that he will lead this Company into the future. It’s a vote of confidence in our strategy that Jeff and the Board have landed one of the most experienced leaders in our industry.”

While President of the Meredith National Media Group, Mr. Griffin oversaw the company’s portfolio of media and marketing properties, and managed the company’s Brand Licensing and book publishing operations. He is well known for creating Meredith Integrated Marketing (MIM), the company’s digital marketing services unit. MIM tripled in size under Mr. Griffin’s leadership, becoming an industry leader in CRM and multiplatform marketing programs. Prior to Meredith Corporation, Mr. Griffin was at Parade, a division of Advance Publications, from 1999 to 2003, where he became its President.

Mr. Griffin has won many awards and industry honors – including being selected as the Publishing Executive of the Year in 2005 by Advertising Age and receiving the AAF Jack Avrett Award for industry and community service. He has also received the National Human Relations Award from the American Jewish Committee in 2005 for his charitable work. Mr. Griffin is currently Vice Chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America, Director of the Internet Advertising Bureau and the Audit Bureau of Circulations, and a member of the AAF Hall of Achievement.

Mr. Griffin graduated with a BA in philosophy, cum laude, from Boston College and received his Master’s Degree from the Yale School of Management. He is a former president of the Yale School of Management alumni association and a director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights.

Now we know: No one.

Time Warner (TWX) has gone outside the company to pluck Moore’s successor, recruiting Meredith Corp. (MDP) publishing boss Jack Griffin to take her place. Griffin left his post on Monday to ““pursue another opportunity,” which turns out to be running the world’s largest magazine company.

Moore has been at Time Inc. since 1978 and has been running the company since 2002. She has a contract that runs through next year, but she’s apparently going to leave earlier than that. The New York Times reports that a formal announcement regarding the move is scheduled for next week.

That gives Time Inc. employees a few days to gather up a dossier on Griffin, who isn’t well known in New York publishing circles. That’s either a virtue or a downside when running a company based in Iowa.

Press reports about the impending move suggest that Griffin is supposed to accelerate Time Inc.’s move into digital, and point to his track record of acquiring and integrating nontraditional assets like Hyperfactory, a mobile marketing company. But Meredith hasn’t been aggressive about moving onto the Web or onto platforms like Apple’s iPad, so far. Then again, few of its titles–Ladies’ Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, etc.–seem like natural digital plays.

And, as I noted yesterday, Time Inc.’s paper-and-ink business is still a formidable one: Last quarter the company generated $153 million in operating income on revenue of $919 million. Profits were up 50 percent, due to layoffs and other cost cuts Moore undertook in the past few years, but revenue was flat.

Now it will be up to Griffin to move the top line, too.

That goes for almost every other story in this week’s issue, as well–even the magazine’s letters to the editor section has been cut short. But everything on Time.com that isn’t in the magazine–and there’s whole lot of that stuff–remains free.

Reuters’ Felix Salmon saw fleeting evidence of a Time paywall last month; now NiemanLab has spotted it again. It is possible it’s an experiment, and I’ve asked the magazine for comment. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit is going to stick with the strategy for a while. (UPDATE: Not an experiment, Time Inc. confirms. No more free Time magazine on the the Web. Expect walls to show up on other titles, too.)

After all, they’ve been talking about this for at least a year–recall Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s memo about trying to stuff the digital “genie back in the bottle”. And in theory, the move helps protect the paper’s print edition and its new Apple (AAPL) offshoot: It answers the “why pay $5 when I can read it online for free” question.

But here’s the thing. Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They’re supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago.

So if that’s the case, what’s the real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn’t as real as we’ve been told.

Time Warner (TWX) says ad revenue grew five percent and subscription revenue, two percent. These aren’t huge numbers, and they’re coming off lousy comps, but they’re still positive, and an increase is an increase.

In fact, the ad increase is the first the magazine group has seen in two years, Time Warner announced during its earnings call this morning.

Overall revenue still declined by one percent, but that’s because the unit no longer gets contributions from the Southern Living at Home direct sales business it sold off last year. Online revenue was up 20 percent.

Meanwhile, Time Inc.’s operating income improved dramatically to $50 million; a year ago the unit posted a $32 million loss. Chalk that up to the multiple rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting measures Ann Moore pushed through in the past couple of years.

It’s not close yet. But we are seeing signs that things are at least getting less bad. As Nat Ives notes, the slide in newsstand sales seems to have slowed in the second half of last year, and some titles are even reporting an uptick.

Meanwhile, industry heavyweight Time Inc. also had comparatively good news to report today-things are still down, but not as dire as they have been.

The numbers: The Time Warner (TWX) unit says Q4 subscription revenue was down six percent and ad sales were down 12 percent. Not stellar, but better than Q3, when they were down 13 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

The bottom line, in the meantime, helped by two rounds of major layoffs, stayed steady, with an operating margin of 14 percent.

It’s hard to tell how widespread the recovery is, because different titles have different stories to tell. Time Warner did note that its News unit–that includes Time, Fortune, etc.–lagged behind and that its Style group–overseen directly by CEO Ann Moore–did well.

“Well,” that is, by magazine standards: Revenue was flat in Q4, aided in large part by People magazine. (Now you can see why the Time Warner executive I talked to last year said it was hard to see the company dumping that title in particular.)

The company said that while ad dollars were down nine percent in the U.S., ad rates only shrank by “low single digits,” which is a bit encouraging. And Time Warner said numbers for the current quarter are improving over Q4.

Requisite caveat here: These numbers, and the ones you’re going to see for the next couple quarters, are being compared with really terrible numbers from previous quarters. So the fact that Time Inc. can’t show actual growth tells you that this is still an industry with really big problems. But maybe they’ll be more manageable than we thought–even without the help of a “magical and revolutionary device.”

Here’s the Q4 breakdown (click tables to enlarge):

And, for comparison’s sake, here are the Q3 numbers:

Squires has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet.

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).

Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Many of the venture’s big details have yet to be hammered down. At one point, for instance, Time Inc. had explored the idea of including newspapers in the new company’s offering, sources say. The JV may also want to include a noncontent partner as an investor, as Hulu did with Providence Equity and as Vevo, the “Hulu for music” JV that Universal Music is creating with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, plans to do. That approach is supposed to appease antitrust regulators’ worries about a group of content companies banding together.

But the rough outlines of Squires’s plan are attractive enough to publishers, who are hopeful that mobile devices like the Kindle will create a new market for them. And if that market does show up, they want to make sure they’re the ones in charge of sales and distribution. That’s been a huge problem for the music industry, whose digital sales are essentially controlled by Apple. And it has already cropped up as a point of contention with Amazon, which currently handles sales for all content delivered via its Kindle reader.

Other selling points for the JV: The ability to set standards for mobile content and the ability to integrate advertising into the publications. One thing the company isn’t supposed to do: Create an e-reader itself.

The takeaway, via a Time Inc. presentation that has circulated among publishers: “our destiny with readers, advertisers and distributors … [is] in our hands.”

Of course, there are plenty of hurdles facing the joint venture, starting with the fact that media joint ventures have a checkered record at best (though Hearst and Condé, for instance, have already partnered on Comag, a wholesale distribution company). But there are bigger problems for Squires and company. For instance:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll  have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

But publishers feel they’ve got nothing to lose by trying. “We know that traditional magazines are going away, and that magazines on the Web don’t work,” says a publishing executive working on the plan. “But this gives us a chance to serve the reader who will pay for content, and provide advertising that really works. Can you think of a better idea?”

While Squires solves that riddle, he’ll leave his day job as head of the “news business unit” (Time, Fortune, Money, etc.). In his place will be… Moore, who is already running the company’s style group.

I chatted briefly via email with Squires, who is good-natured about the assignment. But I have to take issue with him (and everyone else who uses this example) re iTunes. Apple (AAPL) didn’t prove that people are willing to pay for content online–we’d already seen that (at The Wall Street Journal, among other examples). Apple proved that people are willing to pay for portions–that would be songs–of products that were previously only sold in bundles–that would be CDs.

You can debate whether this was terrible for the music industry or simply the least-bad option. But I don’t think it makes sense to compare the experience of the music industry with news and other Web content that people aren’t used to paying for in any form.

Here’s my Q&A with Squires:

MediaMemo: I’m struck by Ann’s “genie” reference–are we meant to take that in a tongue-in-cheek way, or do you folks really think you can put the free-content genie back in the bottle? Or am I misinterpreting that?

John Squires: We’re not unrealistic about the challenge, but iTunes showed people will pay for something attractively packaged and fairly priced that they once got for free….We also wanted to get your attention. So I guess we’re genies.

MM: Do you imagine that Time Inc. will be taking content that’s currently available for free online and putting it behind a pay wall? Or are you more focused on creating new products you can charge for?

JS: This is part of what we’ll be testing. Certainly some online content will remain free because we’re eager to keep our large online audiences (over 26 million Nielsen uniques) and successful advertising model. Some other online content may be subscription-based. And the content we create for mobile readers will be a completely new experience, with different design and functions that we think consumers will want to pay for.

MM: Haven’t heard Time Inc.’s voice in the “Google isn’t playing fair” chorus. How much, if any, energy are you spending on getting the search engine to help you/take less from you, etc.?

JS: We’re not part of that chorus at the moment.

MM: Is this a permanent assignment or will you go back to News at some point?

JS: We’ll see what comes out of this assignment.

And here’s the companywide memo from Moore:

To:       Time Inc. Employees

From:   Ann Moore

Re: How to Put the Genie Back Into the Bottle; Special Assignment for John Squires

It won’t be a revelation to any of you that the publishing business is changing rapidly. While print magazines are not going away, and while we have built vibrant websites with over 26 million unique visitors and 750 million pages views each month, it’s increasingly clear that finding the right digital business model is crucial for the future of our business. We need to develop a strategy for the portable digital world and to refine our views on paid content.

Given the magnitude of the opportunity, I have asked John Squires to take on a new role and devote his full time efforts this summer to developing the best business plan for the future. John’s qualifications for this assignment are ideal. He has a strong background in consumer marketing and digital content and has stature in the publishing industry, as well as with digital software and hardware companies. It is likely we will be seeking partners and allies in our quest to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’.

As many of you know, we are currently pursuing four related initiatives:

1.    Evolving our current website businesses by identifying and developing consumer revenue streams.

2.    Accelerating the creation of applications for smartphone platforms.

3.    Developing new products and business models for portable digital readers.

4.    Exploring partnerships with other publishers to develop the optimal retail store for our digital products.

John will need the support of many, including Consumer Marketing, Legal, Strategy and Business Development, and the Time Inc. titles. Please pitch in with all your resources available when he calls.

During this assignment, similar to the role I’m playing at the Style and Entertainment Group, I will assume responsibility for the News Business Unit.

A.M.

Time Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today: Our wounds are self-inflicted, and we can heal them.

But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors. Her magazine company performed as badly as the rest of the industry did in the last quarter.

Time Inc. saw ad revenue drop 30 percent in the first three months of 2009, which corresponds roughly to the 26 percent drop in ad pages the overall magazine business recorded during the same time.

That drop is much worse than industry executives had braced for last fall when nearly every publishing company, Time Inc. included, made a round of layoffs. And as this quarter’s miserable numbers trickled in, publishers from Forbes to Condé Nast have made a second round of cuts to adjust to the new reality.

Time Inc. hasn’t done so, or at least not in a significant manner. But it may have to. One suggestion, offered to me by a Time Warner (TWX) executive yesterday: “Time has way too many magazines. They should fix that.”

For the record, Time Inc. has “more than 115 titles” world-wide.

Earlier today, Silicon Alley Insider reported that layoffs at AOL, which had been announced in January, were finally taking place.

Actually, said an AOL insider, about 10 percent of the layoffs, or 70 people, have been let go since the announcement. The pace just got ratcheted up today, adding another 300 to the pyre at the troubled Time Warner (TWX) online division.

But, said several sources, the slashing of staff might go well beyond what has been announced, as AOL continues to drill down on its three-pronged strategy: social networking and communications (People Networks), content (MediaGlow) and advertising (Platform-A).

That’s no surprise since AOL’s options have landed, to say the least, in that dreaded rock-and-hard place.

The interest by Yahoo (YHOO) in merging with AOL, for example, has waxed and waned–it’s waned right now, sources said, though not completely–and there seem to be no true suitors on the horizon.

And new Platform-A head (and former Yahoo sales exec) Greg Coleman–whose business has to drive revenue growth–cannot perform miracles in such a weak environment, no matter what cool new products and offerings either People Networks head Joanna Shields or MediaGlow President Bill Wilson create.

Thus, with the ever-weakening economy, there is still fat to be cut out, especially since Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes either has to sell AOL off or make it work a whole lot better.

And working better likely means more cuts–and a whole lot more of them.

That’s caused a lot of people inside AOL and also a wider circle at Time Warner to increasingly point the finger of blame at AOL CEO Randy Falco, wondering if and when he will suffer too.

“Why Randy Falco gets to keep his job is a mystery to a lot of people,” said one top exec at another division.

While one might look at, say, the media giant’s magazine division and ask the same of its head, Ann Moore, the more obvious answer is that times are tough all over and not just at Time Warner.

Said an AOL insider who does not like Falco’s leadership, but was sympathetic: “He probably should have pushed to sell it off more when times were better, but that was being run by corporate, so now he just has to deal with a weak economy and an online property whose value has been declining for a long time.”

In any case, for now, there’s no joy in Mudville. When the domestic layoffs are done by the end of this month, a source said, the company will turn to international firings (it’s harder to dump folks in Europe, apparently).

But, as another baseball maxim goes: At least when it comes to cuts at AOL, it’s never over until it’s over.

Time Inc. boss Ann Moore made her case for the survival of magazines, and in a broader sense, traditional media: If they don’t make it, who’s going to do the work to get hard-to-find information?

If she’d just waited a few weeks, she could have saved herself some trouble and simply handed everyone she met a copy of today’s New York Observer, which has a great story about the story behind the Alex Rodriguez/steroids story that her own Sports Illustrated broke on Saturday.

Per the Observer’s John Koblin, here’s some of what SI reporter Selena Roberts (pictured above) went through to get the story:

• Roberts started on the story at least four months ago, when she was assigned a general profile of the Yankees superstar.
• By January, Roberts and colleague David Epstein were confirming rumors that Rodriguez’s name had surfaced in a 2003 drug test. They eventually cobbled together four different sources to confirm their story.
• Last week, Roberts flew from New York to Miami to confront Rodriguez directly. After an encounter with a security guard and the Miami police, she drove by his house, then tracked him down at a local gym.
• After getting a “no comment” from the player, she conferred with her editors, and the SI team then spent another 48 hours dotting i’s and crossing t’s before publishing.

It’s a neat tale, and one the folks at Time Warner (TWX) should be proud of. And it’s a good counterpoint to pundits who assure us that one day soon in the brave new world, old media gatekeepers like SI will be replaced by the collective wisdom of the Web. Because the last time I checked, crowd-sourcing didn’t pay for months of reporting, flights to Miami, a team of lawyers, etc.

Could a dogged individual, working without a net, have gotten this story? Theoretically. And some bloggers working primarily with crowd-sourced tips have done some great work, too–see the great work that  Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo did on the Justice Department/Attorney General scandal last year. And, just to knock down that straw man–big media, armed with all sorts of resources, does get all sorts of stuff wrong, as the New York Times has admitted on a couple of occasions now.

But look at how much work Roberts and SI had to invest in tracking down what in the end isn’t a story that’s truly important, in a State-of-the-Union sense of the word. Now think about how much work it takes to suss out answers to much less sexy but more crucial questions, about, say, the way our government works.

I still don’t think that Moore’s argument–that these publications will survive because we need them to–will pan out. And I worry that only a small slice of us will get good info about important stuff. But when that day comes, I hope someone will have created a free Web archive of reporting like Roberts’s story, so that the rest of us can get a sense of what we’re missing.

Other key data points from Time Warner’s (TWX) Q4 report card:

Overall revenue at AOL dropped 23 percent (the remainder of the decrease stems from AOL’s evaporating but still substantial dial-up business). But operating income, before accounting for a gigantic write-off the company had preannounced, actually increased six percent. So if new sales boss Greg Coleman, last seen at Yahoo (YHOO), can make even modest progress in the next couple months, AOL will be able to limp along for a bit longer.

But not before more overhauls: Time Warner announced that it has earmarked another $250 million for restructuring charges at AOL and its Warner Bros. movie studios in 2009.

Time Inc.’s ad revenues dropped 20 percent, and adjusted operating income dropped 70 percent. But you can’t pin all of that on Ann Moore and company: Time had to take a $57 million charge on rent that Lehman Bros. (R.I.P.) won’t be paying to lease space at the company’s midtown office.

TIme Warner’s network TV business–HBO and Turner Broadcasting–did just fine. Gangbusters, really, by today’s standards: Revenues were up nine percent, including a seven percent bump in ad revenues.

Want to see the numbers for yourself? Click the table below to enlarge, or read the full release:

Here’s an excerpt from the acceptance speech she delivered at the Magazine Publishers of America luncheon. I’m reprinting it here (with her staff’s help) because I think it’s a nice summation of why many of us are dismayed to see what’s happening to traditional media.

But I also think Moore’s argument–that quality magazines/newspapers/journalism will survive because society needs them to–doesn’t hold up.

The more I chew on this stuff, the more I fear that we’re headed for a bifurcated world: People with a lot of resources will get access to high-quality information. Everyone else will get free stuff that has little value. More on that later, and often.

First, I’m grateful in these crazy times that our readers have not abandoned us. On the contrary, readership of magazines is up. And at Time inc our circulation and net profit was up in 2008.

Consumers are still reading…. and buying…. It’s true — we had to go back on press four times for Time’s person of the year Obama issue. Let’s not forget 85 percent of adults in this country still read magazines

And I believe more than ever, especially during times like these, people will turn to trusted content and trusted brands. Am I the only person to notice that even “60 Minutes” has returned to the top ten tv shows?

Second, I’m grateful that print advertising is still very effective. The best [return on investment] is a media mix. So our core businesses—-print magazines–remain very effective vehicles for advertising messages in building brand awareness and purchase intent. That’ s a fact.

Third, I’m grateful that the basic need for fact-based information will not go away. Good editors will be needed more–not less– in an age of too much information. The public will increasingly understand the need for fact-based reporting…because sketchy information can lead to trouble.

The fastest way to turn a college classroom on the subject is to remind them of the price they paid for the rumor of weapons of mass destruction. We have somehow failed to teach the millenials that trustworthy information is essential for the free markets to thrive…

This is not a new problem for society, by the way. Mark Twain complained, ‘a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. ‘ Wouldn’t Twain be amazed that it can now travel almost at the speed of light?

Real reporting takes expertise, wisdom and judgement. That’s why i still believe great news brands will be standing…like those in the Time and Life building — when the economic recovery comes.

And finally I’m also grateful that we’re not in the newspaper business…although i’m rooting hard for them. A world without newspaper journalism is not a better world.

I believe our children will eventually understand that all content can’t be free.Someone has to pay for a Baghdad bureau in the red zone. For investigative reporting. For fact checking. A world without journalism is not a better world.

Thanks to the MediaMemo readers who’ve been sending in tips, leads and generally useful information about what’s happening at Time Inc., the magazine arm of Time Warner (TWX). Thanks to you, I can report that:

• “About 8-10 people” were let go yesterday from InStyle‘s editorial group.
• Sara Jacobs, VP of Web Application Delivery, has been let go, a move one reader surmises is a “strategy…to gut the Internet unit and let the old magazine IT guys run the show.”

I also want to pass along the thoughts of a 20+ year Time Inc. veteran who says I’m a fool for surmising that CEO Ann Moore has cut down on reorg/layoff memos because of strategic concerns: “The real reason she doesn’t want to put any more of this stuff in writing is that when the rank & file read this stuff it makes us ill. The memos are of necessity tortourously long and nonsensical.”

Here’s the longer take from the Time Inc. vet, who, for obvious reasons, has asked to remain anonymous:

I could throw a rock from my office and hit 10 people with more good ideas on how to take Time Inc. into the digital age than Ann. The ‘reorg’ is classic Moore management. The problem was a too high cost structure, but it would be too embarrassing to her to just say that, so the whole thing has to be cloaked as a ‘strategic realignment of assets.’ The new structure is so complicated, with so many ‘dotted-line’ reporting structures that the new group publishers have no clue how things will work. Even more unbelievably, the new structure is based on the structure under which Fortune and Money have been operating for the past 2-3 years. It is an objective, easily quantified fact that that structure has been a failure (for starts, Chris Poleway, the executive who implemented it was fired). So naturally, we’re rolling it out to the rest of the company.”

Anyone else want to chime in? If you want to use your real name, go ahead and leave a comment below. If you’re (understandably) shy, go ahead and email me: I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

The Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. The NY Observer and Gawker have details; the NY Post’s Keith Kelly reports that Matt Turck and Charles Kammerer, publishers of This Old House and Golf Magazine, respectively, are also out.

That brings the total body count (announced firings + requested resignations) to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year. Which means the next few weeks will continue to be unpleasant.

UPDATE: Add another 8-10 from In Style.

One thing Time Inc. staffers won’t be seeing during that time: More memos announcing details of the reorg. Executives at the company seem to have concluded that internal communications that have been showing up at this Web site and others haven’t helped employee morale. That seems sensible. But it also means that employees have even less information about their fate than before.

Meanwhile, I’m still collecting tips. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

After asking about 100 editorial employees to give up their jobs today, Time Inc. announced a round of involuntary job cuts: Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine publisher said it is firing 92 people in an overhaul of its consumer marketing and sales group.

Time Inc. hasn’t ever formally announced the number of cuts it intends to make this fall, but company officials say the New York Times’ report that pegged the number at 600 to be a reasonable estimate. By that count, there are another 400 or so positions that will disappear in the coming weeks.

Below, the reorg memo from consumer marketing and sales EVP Brian Wolfe, who reports directly to Time Inc CEO Ann Moore (pictured) and oversees a team that sells across all of the company’s titles.

TO: Time Inc. Consumer Marketing and Sales
FROM: Brian Wolfe
RE: Reorganization

I’d like to provide further detail regarding our new Consumer Marketing & Sales organization.

These changes were driven both by the current economic landscape, as well as the opportunity to be more focused on activities that drive our bottom line.

Each of our magazine and digital properties will be assigned to a brand leader, who will set strategic direction for our consumer activities and manage the P&L for their respective magazines. Their focus will include net paid and rate base planning, research, relationships with edit and ad sales, audience development, branding, and newsstand. Titles that already have substantial partnership volume will maintain partnership sales/operations teams; the balance of partnership activities will be managed by Synapse. Each brand leader (VP) will manage a ‘group’ of magazines, which align with the 3 different business units that Ann Moore detailed in her memo 2 weeks ago. Consumer Marketing activities for all U.S. Time Inc. magazines will now be managed in New York.

VP’s of each of the business units are detailed below for the print publications and related websites:

· Holley Cavanna, Vice President, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, Essence
· Steve Crowe, Vice President, Southern Living, Coastal Living, Southern Accents
· Carrie Goldin, Vice President, Real Simple, All You, This Old House
· Matthew Hoffmeyer, Vice President, Fortune, Money, Fortune Small Business
· Holley Klingel, Vice President, Sunset
· Jennifer Ogden-Reese, Vice President, People, People en Espanol, Stylewatch
· Jose Perez, Vice President, Cooking Light, Health, Cottage Living
· John Reese, Vice President, Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Golf
· Nate Simmons, Vice President, TIME, TIME Canada, Time For Kids

As you know, consumer marketing has played a key role in the past 2 years in helping to drive growth in our digital audiences. The role of consumer marketing in supporting Time Inc.’s digital growth will only increase in the future. Reflecting that goal, each business unit will be supported by an audience development expert who will report directly into their business unit VP. Reporting on our magazines digital activities has also become a key skill in consumer marketing. We will continue to provide this critical function for our websites by forming a digital reporting team, which will report to Holley Cavanna. In addition, Michael Dub’s audience development and analytics team, which was formerly part of TII, will now be part of consumer marketing and will also report to Holley Cavanna.  With this entire digital team in place, I feel very confident about our ability to apply our skills and expertise to this critical piece of Time Inc.’s future growth.

Going forward, all of our marketing efforts will be centralized in a team led by Sarah Jack, Vice President, Marketing. Sarah’s team will manage the new business and retention activities for all of our magazines. There will be a new business and retention director reporting to Sarah and each business unit will have a new business and retention manager and associate to support their marketing activities. This group represents the best marketers in our division and will enable us to further develop and leverage expertise in these areas. I expect this team to develop a balanced testing agenda, share best practices and results, and be singularly focused on bringing the best marketing possible to our brands. Our multi-title marketing efforts, which have continually resulted in volume growth at Time Direct Ventures (TDV) in recent years, will be managed by a team which will now report in to Sarah. In addition, an agency department and our List Rental team, led by Christine Slusarek, will also report to Sarah.

Jeff Blatt will continue in his role as TDV President and will manage a group that will focus on continuing to grow our fundraising and scouting volume. In addition, our Maghound team, led by Dave Ventresca, will continue to report to Jeff.

Sarah Jack, the brand VPs, Jeff, in his role as TDV President and Synapse CEO, Time Warner Retail (TWR) CEO & President Rich Jacobsen, and QSP CEO & President Kerry Hatch will all report to me.

As I mentioned last week, Howard Rosen has joined our team as SVP, Group General Manager, reporting to Howard Averill, Time Inc. CFO.  Reporting to Howard will be:

· Sean McDermott, Vice President, Finance.  Sean will continue to be responsible for the roll-up of our consumer marketing financials and will also manage a centralized group of planners, who will be assigned to individual business units.  In addition, Sean will manage the consumer marketing business office.

· John Tighe, Vice President, Promotions, Production & Operations.
· Scott Breininger, Vice President, Marketing Operations, which includes Online Operations, Payment, Database Marketing Services, Telemedia and Fulfillment.
· Bill Miller, Executive Director, Legal

Also reporting to Howard will be the CFOs of TWR, Synapse and QSP as well as our customer service and fulfillment operations in the United States and abroad, led respectively by Tim Adams and Sue Knights.

Howard’s groups will now support activities for all of Time Inc.’s U.S. magazines. These departments have historically been a critical part of our competitive advantage, and their continued expertise and excellent work will remain key components to our future growth.

The changes we announced today represent a significant departure from the way we currently operate. Critical to our future success will be the following principles:

We will be a marketing and operations division. We will meet our financial and compliance objectives, but will spend far less time on financial reporting and variance analysis. Ownership and reporting of the P&L will reside solely within our division. We will bring extreme focus to marketing and innovation and to the execution of our marketing plans. By doing so, we will continually improve our P&L.

We will have relentless focus on activities and levers that drive the business. We;ll have to prioritize and make difficult decisions on how we spend our time and allocate our resources. We need to be diligent about setting goals and not be distracted by requests or activities that are not in direct support of these goals.

We will need even greater emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. We are already good at sharing information and leveraging best practices. Success depends on our ability to be comfortable working well within and across functions and teams. We will also need to be great partners with the management teams of the 3 new Business Units that have been formed at Time Inc.

For our staff, this structure balances the ability to work on our brands, while continuing to improve skills and grow expertise in each of your functional areas.

We have a lot to be proud of. We work for a very profitable company, with incredible brands and talented, smart people. Our division makes a significant contribution to Time Inc.’s bottom line. Our circulation profits are higher this year, when most other print publishers are in decline. And we have continued to launch new products and innovate despite a tough economic environment.

As we move forward in this new organization, we do so without many talented colleagues and friends in New York, Birmingham and Menlo Park. These decisions are never easy, nor are they taken lightly. Please join me in thanking them for their contributions to consumer marketing and Time Inc. and in wishing them well as they move on to the next chapter in their careers.

I have tremendous confidence in this new structure, our people, and our ability and determination to meet our goals. I look forward to working with each of you to successfully grow our business.

Brian”

That will change beginning next week, says Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges. She says CEO Ann Moore (right) and her lieutenants will unveil the “size, staffing and structure of each of the business units” beginning “early next week.”

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t mean that Time Inc. workers will all learn their fate at the same time. A person familiar with the plans tells me the re-org could take a couple weeks to roll out.

Also fuzzy: The number of people who are going to get cut. The 600 number The New York Times reported last month is a ballpark estimate, I’m told. Time is telling individual unit managers to reduce overall payroll, but they’ll have autonomy to make the cuts themselves.

A reasonable but completely unverified hunch: People who work at SI.com, People.com and CNNMoney.com may be in better shape than their colleagues. Those three sites were singled out as top performers during Time Warner’s earnings release this morning, in which the company said the magazine publisher’s overall revenues had dropped seven percent and that ad sales had declined eight percent in the last quarter.

Know more? Let me know: peter@allthingsd.com.

Apologies to Time Inc. employees waiting to learn their fate: There’s no new information to offer you here.

But thanks to a source familiar with Time Inc. boss Ann Moore’s meeting today with the senior staff at her “Style and Entertainment” Group, we can give you a very good sense of what she’s telling employees at Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit.

In short, it’s a pep talk version–sort of–of the reorg memo she distributed last week: Suck it up, buckle down and get to work. We’re restructuring the company because the economy stinks, but we’re still a magazine company, and don’t lose sight of that.

And while we doubt that any of Ann’s employees would take her words lightly, the folks at the Style group need to pay even closer attention–following the reorg, she now oversees the unit directly.

Again, this is not a verbatim transcript of Moore’s remarks. If anyone wants to offer more details, correct errors, etc, please contact me: peter@allthingsd.com.

Some insiders don’t see the need for change. They look outside, but outsiders don’t know how to succeed. We need to be insider/outsiders. The rules have changed, and we need to find who within our org can work as a team. Is this re-org forever? We hope not. It’s a two-year plan. Employees need to act like an equity company that bought Time Inc.

Lastly, Moore added, we will all get through this.

Time Inc. employees have a general idea of the magazine publishing giant’s revamped org chart.

But they still don’t know who’s staying and who’s actually going as the company, a unit of Time Warner (TWX), prepares to can some 600 workers.

That may change after this morning. CEO Ann Moore is hosting an 11 a.m. EST conference call with the troops that a tipster tells MediaMemo is supposed to explain the changes–including the layoffs–”in detail.”

UPDATE: Our original tipster was incorrect: This meeting only concerned Time Inc.’s newly formed “Style And Entertainment” group. That’s People, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle and Essence. We’re also told Ann griped about inaccurate bloggers. Ouch!. Here’s a transcript of her remarks.

Thanks to those of you who have passed along tips and information. If you want to contribute yourself, drop me a line: peter@allthingsd.com.

One of note for MediaMemo readers: The departure of Ned Desmond, a longtime Time Inc. vet who was most recent title was President of Time Inc. Interactive. Ned’s bio is here; nice-to-know-you memo from Ann Moore follows:

To:        Time Inc. Employees

A.M.                 J.S.

Time Inc., the largest magazine company in the world, is laying off hundreds and reorganizing itself drastically, due to tough economic conditions, especially in advertising, as well as the more inexorable diminishing of its business as readers move to the Web.

Time Inc. is a unit of Time Warner (TWX), as is the AOL online unit.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore penned the email memo to employees tonight. She tried to tout gains in its digital business–part of the reason for the reorg is to move more of its content to Web platforms–noting 26 million people visit its Time Inc. sites monthly.

Which is, well, still not as big as it should be.

Moore, as well as Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, was interviewed by me onstage at two different D: All Things Digital conferences, where the challenges facing the magazine business were discussed by both.

Those challenges, obviously, continue.

Both videos are below.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore at D5, May 2007:

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes at D6, May 2008 (Part 4 of 4):

And here’s the entire Moore memo on the layoffs and reorg:

From: Moore, Ann – Executive Administration
Sent: Tue Oct 28 18:00:37 2008
Subject: Staff Announcement

October 28, 2008

To: Time Inc. Employees
From: Ann Moore
Re: Staff Announcement

As all of you are aware, industry conditions have been challenging due to the financial crisis, which has produced sharp decreases in advertising spending. This is expected to continue through most of 2009.

It’s important that we at Time Inc. react quickly to this new reality in order to maintain our financial strength, build our market position, and sharpen our ability to bounce back at the first signs of economic recovery. All the while we must continue to give our readers and audience the high quality editorial products they have come to expect from our publications and websites.

This is a challenge, unlike any we’ve seen before. And after much careful study and consultation with many of you who run our businesses, I have concluded that it is no longer possible to operate our company with the same decentralized management structure that served us so well during our many years of sustained growth.

So, effective tomorrow, we are going to implement a much more centralized management structure, organized into three business units that will group together titles that share similar audiences, advertisers, and the talents and skills of their staffs. The goal is to enable our company to move faster, go to market smarter, save significant costs, and employ our editorial resources more efficiently.

In broad strokes, here is how it will work:

Business Units. Time Inc.’s 24 U.S. magazines and companion web sites will be grouped into three business units, each reporting to a senior corporate executive. Each unit will have a similar structure that will include four key executives to direct the ad sales, digital business, financial and editorial efforts across that group. One of the most significant centralizing features of this new structure is that each of the three units will have one General Manager, responsible for all budgeting in the unit, who will report directly to Time Inc. EVP and CFO Howard Averill, with a dotted line to their respective senior operating executive.

The three Business Units will consist of:

* News: the existing print and digital properties in the TIME group, the Fortune|Money group, and the Sports Illustrated group, as well as Life.com and GEE. John Squires, EVP Time Inc. will manage the News Business Unit.
* Style and Entertainment: the existing print and digital properties in the PEOPLE group, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, and Essence. I will act as the EVP for this group so the Style and Entertainment Business Unit will report to me.
* Lifestyle: the existing print and digital properties of Real Simple, This Old House, All You, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Sunset, Health, Cottage Living, Coastal Living, and Southern Accents, along with MyRecipes.com and MyHomeIdeas.com. Sylvia Auton, EVP Time Inc. will manage the Lifestyle Business Unit, while also retaining responsibility for IPC Media.

Editorial. John Huey continues as Time Inc.’s Editor-in-Chief, overseeing the News Business Unit Managing Editors and Martha Nelson, the Managing Editor of the Style and Entertainment Business Unit. In editorial alone we have seen three recent examples of how this sharing across titles can work to our benefit. During the summer Olympics, Sports Illustrated set up a system to supply Time.com with a fantastic array of photos from the games; in Europe and Asia, FORTUNE and TIME already are sharing correspondents; and, of course, the most visible example was the recent TIME cover story on the economy written by FORTUNE managing editor Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan. In the new structure we will see much more of this kind of cooperation.

Time Inc. Advertising Sales and Marketing. Given the difficult ad sales environment, it is critical that all of our brands work together to efficiently and effectively offer advertisers the solutions they need. For this reason, we are creating Time Inc. Advertising Sales and Marketing, a group that will be charged with setting and executing corporate ad sales strategy along with the ad sales head for each business unit. Stephanie George will become President of Time Inc. Advertising Sales and Marketing and will remain a Time Inc. EVP. She will also remain on the Board of American Express Publishing.

Time Inc. Consumer Marketing and Sales. Consumer Marketing and Sales will be run by Brian Wolfe, who has been promoted to EVP and will report directly to me. All Consumer Marketing and Sales activities will be centralized under Brian. This department will be responsible for circulation net income across all U.S. Magazines, as well as Synapse, QSP, Time Warner Retail, Time Customer Service, and TW4, Time Inc.’s international fulfillment operation.

Everyone in the Consumer Marketing organization should be proud of their accomplishments in this difficult environment–some of our largest newsstand titles are having record years and we are seeing strong circulation net income results across the company. These organizational changes, along with the recent acquisition of QSP and the incorporation of Synapse into Time Inc. Consumer Marketing and Sales, will give Brian and his team the ability to continue this momentum by making the best decisions for the company as a whole, and making them quickly and definitively.

Finally, I’m pleased to announce the promotions of Kerry Bessey and Maurice Edelson to EVP, Time Inc.

Time Inc. Senior Management along with the Business Unit leaders are working on restructuring within each group, and will announce further changes in the coming weeks. While the broader economy and the advertising industry both continue to present challenges, I know we can weather this storm and emerge as an even stronger company when the economy begins to recover. We are still a very profitable company. Our cash flow is strong. We have made tremendous progress with our digital business. Each month, more than 26 million people visit Time Inc. websites. We know our consumers continue to value our magazines and websites. We have the top brands in all the categories where we publish and we’re finding exciting new ways to expand our titles beyond the printed page and the web. The importance of fact-based journalism has never been clearer given the many serious issues facing the world and our core competency, trusted editing skills, has never been more needed than in this time of too much information.

I’d like to thank you all for your continued hard work.

A.M.

Ann Moore says Time Inc. really does get the Internet.

It is not as if the magazine giant has had a lot of choice in that matter, but the CEO of Time Inc. seems to embrace the inevitable with resolve and even excitement–which is rare in old-media circles still–in this interview.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.

Today, Moore gets the focus:

The interviews featured are with famed filmmaker George Lucas, CBS CEO Les Moonves, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and a solo interview with Apple legend Steve Jobs.

Here’s the video I did for the tab on the conference, focusing on the strides made by traditional media in dealing with the Web and its impact.

In related D news, our official conference page has now been relocated to this site from its old one, and you can now access it here. You can get all sorts of information, as well as pictures and videos from the first through the fourth D conferences.

We will not be opening registration for D6, which will take place May 27 to 29, 2008, until the fall, although Walt and I are already thinking about next year’s program.

Full pictures and video for D5 will be up on this site soon, first for conference attendees and then for everyone. Until then, check out our highlights of the conference with blogs, video and pictures here.

“We could create such a currency,” said Bewkes at an investment conference, noting that AOL did not have the heft that other players like Yahoo and Google did, because it did not stand alone as a pure-play Web firm. “We certainly contemplated doing that.”

Besides Bewkes’s stating of the obviously obvious, it is a contemplation that is, as the Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams song goes, too much, too little, too late. Here’s why:

TOO MUCH: Face it, Time Warner’s Hamlet act over what to do with AOL is of the most peculiar variety, given that it has been going on since the forces of Time Warner seized back the company from the interlopers from AOL more than four years ago, after what was billed as the deal of the new century turned out to be more like a steal.

But instead of forging ahead after they regained control and doubling down on the company’s digital bets right after the first Internet bubble burst, the pain and rage caused by the merger debacle caused the company to maintain a vise grip on AOL that allowed its power and influence to wither rather than flourish as the Web’s prospects brightened again.

Just using MySpace, which burst on the scene in the last two years, as an example: It took user-generated content, social networking and communications tools and parlayed them into one of the biggest sites on the Internet today. Sadly, each one of those qualities that allowed MySpace to soar were once the major elements of AOL and, I dare say, where such online practices were invented.

TOO LITTLE: OK, fine, you maybe want to spin it out? Well, no one I have interviewed as potential investors or even buyers wants to do that if Time Warner holds onto too big a stake in the venture. That desire not to lose control of AOL by Time Warner is problematic for anyone considering making a big bet with the service, which–though declining in relevance and sheer power–is still one of the bigger and most well-known brands on the Web.

If Time Warner is serious about giving AOL the wings it needs to fly, it has to not clip them in the process and not keep it too close to the nest. As Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore noted in an interview at D5 last week, its magazine sites are doing a lot better since they seized control of their own destiny and are making choices based on individual needs and consumer desire.

AOL needs to be able to act as if it is not beholden to anyone, except its customers. One of its greatest recent successes, TMZ.com (which I did a post about here), a gossip site, is in direct competition with Time Inc.’s People.com site. I say, bring a lot more of that on.

TOO LATE: Would that it could. While waiting, competitors have snapped up all the good start-ups that companies like AOL need to keep innovating. Luckily, AOL managed to get the most excellent Advertising.com, but it never got its hands on the really good stuff like Flickr, for example, and time is not on its side here.

And the more interesting small companies AOL has bought, like Userplane, maker of really terrific communication apps for Web sites, seem to languish within the company (though this is a problem not particular to AOL).

While I am sure to irk Time Warner with a quote from the ultimate Ghost of Disastrous Mergers Past, former AOL Time Warner (when it was called that) Chairman Steve Case said it best when he was interviewed from the stage at D5 last week, too.

I asked him about AOL’s prospects and his message was on point, as painful as it might be for Time Warner execs to hear from such a source:

“I am disappointed that 10 years ago we were kind of in the catbird seat and, for a variety of reasons, [AOL]‘s lost some of that momentum,” he said. “It’s still a major force … but it is certainly not the epicenter of the industry that it was once before.”

It surely is not, and no amount of Wall Street daydreaming can fix that.

And that’s without what was clearly the blockbuster joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple, which got a mountain of attention, as it deserves for both its historic implications (the two icons of tech in a rare analog appearance together) and its sheer drama (PC guy meets Mac guy, except in real life!).

While it was not the WrestleMania some would have preferred, I thought it was riveting to see two people with very little left to prove about anything in their professional careers and who will be in the history books willing to go out on a bit of a limb and talk from a more personal place.

In addition, watching these longtime rivals and also collaborators kibitz about their tech-war stories, each correcting the other’s memories, was really interesting. Here is a great comic strip from the Joy of Tech Web site about the interview that says it all.

But outside of the glare of the pairing, there were a lot of highlights and insights I gleaned from the other onstage interviews.

1. THE MSM FINALLY GETS IT: One of the things that struck me was how comfortable and easygoing all the traditional media executives interviewed were. CBS’s Les Moonves, Peter Chernin of News Corp., Ann Moore of Time Inc. and even suing-Google-for-a-billion Philippe Dauman of Viacom all seemed less fearful of the Web than ready and eager to use it for their benefit.

Of course, there are copyright issues for all, which was articulately explained by Dauman (who came off as reasonable in his case against Google’s YouTube), but all seemed to understand the need to find new business models and new distribution methods for their content.

They also had the funniest videos–here is Moore’s faux Geico ad with actor Mario Cantone and Viacom’s genius Stephen Colbert monologue.

2. DANCING WITH THE TECH STARS: On the flip side of that, both Google’s Eric Schmidt and YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen need to at least be a bit more respectful in public about other peoples’ work and rights. It cannot and will not be, as much as I love the idea of empowerment of the consumer, just the “community” that decides what is OK to post.

And, as smart as they might be, it’s hard to rely simply on their assurances that their brainiac engineers will come up with a way soon to stop copyright theft. This is a delicate dance that Google must pull off without two left–and arrogant–feet.

Still, YouTube’s intro video was very sweet, especially Chen and Hurley scarfing donuts.

3. GEORGE LUCAS IS NOT SHY: While the legendary filmmaker has always been known as shy, Lucas had not even dropped his bags on the floor of the hotel lobby before he was deep in conversation and debate about the digital sector with a plethora of folks gathered round.

And he did not mind being pugnacious either, telling YouTube’s Hurley and Chen that they should endow a film school to make up for all the crappy video they had unleashed on the world.

Onstage, Lucas, no lover of Hollywood’s machinations either, gave a great label to some video on the Web, which he called “circus,” or, better still, “throwing puppies on a highway,” compared to “art” that endures.

4. SEN. JOHN MCCAIN IS ALSO NOT SHY: About sticking to his guns, so to speak, related to his stance to continue fighting in Iraq and also about the risks posed by the spread, if we withdraw too early, of Islamic Jihadism.

But Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Cisco’s John Chambers do look the part of cabinet members here. What about Steve Case, whose new businesses center around health, as surgeon general? Or Charles Simonyi, former Microsoft exec and recent space traveler, for head of NASA?

But, whatever your view about the war, I think we can all respectfully disagree with Sen. McCain’s contention that cellphone service in the U.S. is top-notch. Clearly, he has never been to the black hole of mobile coverage near Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road lately.

I am only here for another three years. I am going to be known for transforming Time Inc. For diversifying Time Inc. And I am going to be the person who leads the transformation, to make sure we are around for another 80 years.”

–Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, Feb. 12, 2007

As Chairman and CEO of Time Inc., Ann Moore has been responsible for modernizing the iconic magazine publisher amid an ugly downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly acute competition from the Internet. But that’s no easy task.The publisher is still playing catch-up in the digital arena. And the struggle to translate the huge trove of Time content into influential digital products is one that may well take longer than the three years Moore posits.

• 8:40 a.m. PDT: Kara’s conversation with Ann Moore is prefaced with a short, but wacky, video featuring comedian Mario Cantone.
• Moore: What have I learned in the last year? You can make money with content online.
• What’s the lesson learned from the AOL-Time Warner marriage? You need a pre-nup.
• 8:45 a.m. Kara asks about Time Inc.’s digital strategy, or lack thereof. Moore bristles a bit. Suggests that she’s been fighting to develop a strategy for years, but ran into roadblocks, claims her plans to launch InStyle.com back in the day were shut down by AOL management. Notes that much of Time Inc.’s digital content at the time was kept behind a curtain.
• Moore: “I love the Internet. As a woman, nobody’s solved shopping for me online. There’s still a big niche waiting to be filled there, guys.” [My God, did she really just say that? I guess she did. Wow - you've come a long way baby.]
• 8:50 a.m. Business-side views on the integration of print and online: Kara wonders about the fate of People magazine in the era of Paris Hilton and TMZ.Kara: I don’t read People.Moore: Well, you should start. … I know the smaller gossip sites think they’re big and important, but seriously–get out of the way.

  Moore notes that People.com is very sticky. She claims it gets 71 page views per visit–must be harder than I thought to locate those Pitt/Jolie baby photos online. (Somebody call Jakob Nielsen.)

• 8:55 a.m. Kara presses on: “You don’t worry about these upstart celebrity sites?”Moore: “They’re not hurting us in any way. I don’t fear cannibalization. You don’t want to be alone in the marketplace.”
• On the decline of print pages in magazines: People are still reading magazines; reading is alive and well. The instabilities are on the advertising side. She singles out the struggling business-magazine sector. Time’s solution: consolidate its business publications online at CNNmoney.com.
• 9 a.m. What does Time Inc. spend on news coverage in Iraq? A lot, Moore says. “But we have to. I’m just stunned that [journalists] are even willing to go there.”
• “We’re not breaking news” in the weekly Time magazine, Moore explains, but “we’re breaking it online. … It’s a very different experience to read Time magazine than it is to read Time online. Time magazine is long for journalism, a complement to what we’re offering online.”
• 9:05 a.m.: Moving on to recent cuts at Time: “We had to concentrate on our core franchise, so we divested about 1,000 people from our magazines.” Apparently, a few lawyers among them. As an example, Moore cites the silliness of having a puff piece in People lawyered as heavily as a hard-hitting piece in Time.
• Moore: “I think you’ll find the morale at Time now is better if you’re a writer.”

  Kara: “Yeah, because you fired the editor.”

• 9:10 a.m. What do you make of user-generated content, social-news sites like Digg? Moore says “it’s cool stuff.”
• Kara asks about the size of the Real Simple audience, curious why anyone reads it. “I’m sorry to say this, but I used to call it Real Simple Minded.”
• On traffic deals: “I’m a content provider. I have to have my content everywhere. Look at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue: 500 million hits. You’ve got to be everywhere.”
• 9:15 a.m.: On the AOL deal: “We’re through the animosity, we’re though the anger. … Time hasn’t missed the boat, either. It’s not too late to leverage what we do well online.”
• 9:20 a.m. “People like print advertising. I just did some research. I took your print magazines away from you (gasp!). And you wanted them back.”
• Q&A:
• To a remark questioning the rationale behind the recent hiring of certain writers, Moore had no qualms: “Just as long as we have as many people mad at us on both sides of the political spectrum.”

More coverage at The Wall Street Journal