The Economist Who's afraid of AOL Time Warner?

"Only six months ago, the merger of AOL and Time Warner was reshaping the media industry, for two main reasons. First, because of its size: it was more than twice as big as its nearest rival, Viacom, and everybody else was scared of being trampled under the sheer weight of the new group. And second, because AOL Time Warner seemed to be redefining the nature of media itself, through its fusion of old and new. At that time, most activities of other big media groups—whether News Corp’s obsession with snapping up DirecTV, a satellite broadcaster (which, for now, it has failed to do), or the attempts by Vivendi Universal, a French media giant, to secure distribution in America (which it has done)—could be explained by their need to stand up to AOL Time Warner..

Today, however, things look a little different."

redux [12.06.01]
News.Com AOL: Just a cog in big media's wheel

"Old media officially took control of new media within the world's largest media company Wednesday, when CEO Gerald Levin unexpectedly announced his retirement. By selecting former Time Warner executive Parsons as his successor less than a year after the AOL-Time Warner merger, Levin disproved many assumptions about the direction of a company conceived at the height of dot-com power--and about the role of the Internet in creating a brave new world of media. Essentially, the establishment neutralized the revolution.

"In its role in a diversified media company, the Internet has a place as does any other medium," said Mark Mooradian, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix, commenting on the significance of the power transfer. "The Internet is simply another one.""

redux [07.08.01]
Columbia Journalism Review AOL/TW spells BIG

"Like its earthly manifestation, which also encompasses portions of Rockefeller Center eight blocks downtown and AOL's digs in Dulles, Virginia, the intangible cultural sprawl of AOL Time Warner is also vast and diverse. With content spanning much of mainstream music, movies, television, magazines, and other media; with access to the distribution of cable and online services; with some 90,000 employees including some 17,000 at Time Inc. and CNN; and with a combined customer base 130 million subscribers strong, the new company is dealing with the convergence of old media and new on an incomparably large scale. Because of its sheer size and the strength of its news brands, CNN and Time Inc., the forces and patterns set in motion by AOL/TW may well affect everyone in journalism -- in print, on TV, and in the evolving online frontier."

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."