Meredith Corp., best known for its old-line magazine business, is set to get a big digital boost. The publisher is buying Allrecipes, the world’s biggest food Web site, from Reader’s Digest Association, according to a source familiar with the transaction.

I don’t have a purchase price, but previous reports have suggested that Reader’s Digest, which started auctioning off the site last fall, could get $200 million or more for the property. My source tells me the deal should be announced shortly, likely as soon as Tuesday. I’ve left messages for executives at both Meredith and Reader’s Digest, though I’m not expecting an answer given the late/early hour. (Update: Meredith, via a press release, confirms the deal and says the transaction is “valued at $175 million.”)

The deal should more than double Meredith’s existing Web presence. Reader’s Digest says Allrecipes attracts more than 36 million monthly unique visitors; Meredith says its Web sites, which include sites for magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Parents, attract some 25 million uniques.

Last fall, Reader’s Digest said Allrecipes had lost $1.9 million on $18 million in sales through the first nine months of 2011, but it expected revenues to spike during the holiday quarter. At the time, it said revenue was growing by nearly 10 percent a year, while traffic was up 41 percent.

Reader’s Digest is a privately held holding company that includes the well-known flagship magazine, as well as titles like Taste of Home. The company exited bankruptcy protection in 2010; last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that the holding company had considered selling all of its assets in one transaction, in hopes of fetching as much as $1 billion.

This will be Meredith’s second purchase from Reader’s Digest in several months. In October 2011, it bought Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine and its Web site from the company.

Time Warner’s publishing unit told its employees this afternoon that five magazines — Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and Real Simple — would be available on the Kindle Fire tomorrow.

The announcement comes after negotiations that dragged on for weeks and continued through Tuesday morning — a process that baffled most of Time Inc.’s peers, who signed on to the new device in time for its September unveiling.

Supposedly, the major stumbling block for Time Inc. was that Amazon has retained the ability to set the retail price for the magazines it sells, which means it could theoretically slash prices or give away the magazines for free. That scenario would be a major bummer for all the publishers who have been diligently trying to convince subscribers and newsstand buyers that they’ve been underpaying for their reading material.

But Amazon has told Time’s competitors, like Condé Nast, Hearst and Meredith, that it doesn’t intend to beat down prices, and that assurance was apparently enough for them. Jeff Bewkes’ company apparently needed more convincing.

This never seemed to be an issue, by the way, with Barnes & Noble and its new Nook tablet; Time Inc. was a part of that gadget’s launch announcement.

Like the titles that Time Inc. sells via the iPad and other Android tablets, access to the Kindle Fire editions will come via bundled deals, where consumers pay a single price and get both paper and digital copies of their magazines.

Here’s the memo that consumer marketing head Steve Sachs sent out at the end of the day:

November 15, 2011
To: Time Inc. Employees
From: Steve Sachs
Re: Time Inc. Titles Now Available on Amazon’s Kindle Fire

I’m pleased to share the news that Time Inc. has just reached a deal with Amazon that will allow subscribers to our magazines to enjoy their subscriptions on the new Kindle Fire. Starting tomorrow, subscribers of FORTUNE, PEOPLE, Real Simple, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED and TIME will be able to access digital editions of these magazines on the Kindle Fire at no additional cost. Other Time Inc. titles will follow shortly.

To date, hundreds of thousands of Time Inc. print subscribers have authenticated to receive their digital editions, with thousands more being added each week. Our agreement with Amazon continues to expand our All Access strategy, adding the Kindle Fire to the growing list of platforms where consumers can enjoy our content, including Apple’s iPad, the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color and NOOK Tablet, the Android Marketplace and Next Issue’s store.

It’s important to note that Time Inc. is the only publisher designing all of its digital magazine apps specifically for tablets. Because we’re producing a rich consumer experience made for each device, our brands translate beautifully — and the Kindle Fire is no exception.

Adding the Amazon launch to our platforms has meant that IT and other dedicated teams have had to work quickly and nimbly. I want to offer a special thanks to all those who have been hard at work bringing our brands to life on tablets.

S.S.

Under the agreement, announced by Lagardère early Monday, Hearst will pay €651 million ($885.9 million) for all or parts of 102 magazine editions in 15 countries, including the publishing rights to Elle magazine outside of France, as well as related digital assets.

Hearst’s cash offer is subject to regulatory approvals in some countries, so the deal won’t close before the third quarter of the year.

The agreement will make Hearst into the second-largest U.S. magazine publisher by circulation, behind only Time Inc., and make Hearst the largest publisher in the world by number of titles owned. The deal also could bolster Hearst’s reach in several key categories, namely fashion/beauty and women’s lifestyle, potentially putting it in a stronger position to compete for advertisers with companies like Conde Nast and Meredith Corp.

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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.

GE’s NBC Universal says its revenues dropped three percent and that its operating profits were down six percent for the last three months of 2008, primarily because of weakness at its local TV stations. [Update: NBC says local station revenue was down 25 percent and operating profit down 55 percent, according to paidContent's David Kaplan, who listened to the morning earnings call.]

Look out below: Meredith Corp. (MDP), which owns a handful of local stations in major markets, says its ad sales are down 40 percent this quarter.

The upside: Cable TV was strong, GE says–because cable systems operators have to pay cable networks like NBCU a fixed fee for each subscriber, regardless of the ad market.

And the real upside: GE shareholders don’t really care that much about NBC’s performance–they’re much more concerned about the company’s huge finance business. The one exception here would be Vivendi, which has already said its going to be writing down its stake in NBCU.

We’ve already heard worrisome predictions about online ad sales at Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL. And those are going to be rosy compared to the people who sell offline. Bad harbinger: Brutal numbers from magazine publisher Meredith Corp (MDP).

The Iowa-based company reported that its print ad revenue was down 20 percent for the last quarter, and that the handful TV stations it owns saw their sales drop about five percent. Meredith says magazine ads are down 15 percent so far for the current quarter, which sounds comparatively rosy (down 15 percent is the new up!).

But the company says TV ads have fallen off a cliff and are plummeting out of view: Sales for the current quarter are down 40 percent, led by auto ads, which have basically disappeared–down a staggering 70 percent.

If those numbers are anything close to indicative of the rest of the market, you’re going to see the ripple effects throughout the media world. Today, for instance, Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente used the Meredith results to help explain why he was cutting his estimates for News Corp. (NWS), owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site.

And things can get much worse, DiClemente notes. The national market for TV ads has stayed relatively strong, but that’s in large part because advertisers locked in their buys last spring. But advertisers still have a window to bail out of those commitments in the near future. And even if they don’t, it’s hard to imagine they’ll re-up at the same levels when the networks pitch them this spring.

What prompted Time Inc. to drop six percent of its staff?

Time Warner (TWX) won’t release its most recent quarterly results until next week. But you can get a pretty good sense of how its publishing unit has been doing by looking at the numbers that Iowa-based magazine giant Meredith Corp. (MDP) just released.

And it’s grim.

Revenues at Meredith’s publishing unit, which puts out titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal (that ad above is from a 1972 issue) dropped nine percent in the last year, to $300 million. But ad revenues fell much more steeply, dropping 18 percent to $148 million. And operating profit plummeted 40 percent, to $33 million.

The good news in the earnings release is that there are still operating profits. But these are worrisome results.

So far this year, most of the ad-based businesses that have complained about declining revenues have pointed to weakness in the financial and auto industries. But Meredith’s publications don’t rely on those sectors for their ads.

From the release:

Companies that operate in Meredith’s endemic advertising categories–including food and beverages, prescription and non-prescription drugs, and home–have been impacted greatly by the current economic downturn. Combined, Meredith magazine advertising revenues in these categories declined over 25 percent in the first quarter, according to Publishers Information Bureau (PIB).”

Not surprisingly, Meredith says that the current quarter looks depressing too. Publishing ad revenues are “down in the high teens” it says.

So, don’t be shocked to see equally lousy news from Time Inc. next week.

[Image Credit: jbcurio]