The Standard Crunch Time at Time Inc.
"The history of Time Inc. - the very fact that it has a history - separates it from AOL, a company founded on the principle of throwing out the old, not guarding it. Just how difficult it will be to truly integrate the two companies is providing endless fodder for speculation, gossip and anxiety. And nowhere is there more potential for a cultural collision than in the hallways of the magazines. It may not be the largest part of the new corporate empire (accounting for just 12 percent of AOL Time Warner revenues last year and 9 percent of earnings), but it is the most visible, publishing 64 titles, including People, InStyle, Money and Entertainment Weekly. Some magazine staffers insist that they see no signs of AOL transforming their workplace - and indeed, many have barely encountered the new guys from Dulles, Va.

But the cultural differences are dramatic."

redux [03.09.01]
MSNBC Frays, both small and big, emerge after AOL, Time Warner merger
"In the Time Inc. division, which is the largest magazine outfit in the U.S., concerns are multiplying faster than staffers initially imagined. Some at Time Inc. are increasingly wary that the magazine business could be threatened by AOL’s lack of journalistic savvy and the huge pressure to meet AOL Time Warner’s extremely aggressive financial goals — including increasing cash flow 30 percent this year — amid an ever-deteriorating advertising climate."

"AOL Chairman Steve Case’s answer: The pressure would force people to abandon old ways of thinking and forge new relationships across its various units."

redux [02.21.01]
BusinessWeek AOL Time Warner: Newsstand or Publisher?
"From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.

"AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator? "

redux [04.11.00]
USA Today AOL to newspapers: Your future is online
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''

The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."

"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."

redux [03.21.00]
Online Journalism Review A Post-Mortem, With Great Prejudice, of the Online Journalism Conference
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."

""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."

Freedom Forum AOL-Time Warner merger raises questions about journalism, concentrated ownership
“AOL has been ethically challenged throughout its existence,” wrote Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor... “I hate to see Time Warner, which has had its own ethical troubles but generally shows high journalistic standards, fall into such hands."

"“[W]hen the biggest online company controls the biggest traditional media company, you'd be wise to turn to other sources for reliable information on, for example, e-commerce and its biggest players,” wrote Gillmor."