Magazine Ownership

The magazine medium does not as yet seem to have cohesive strategy for content on the Internet. The varied nature of the companies that dominate magazines may be a factor.

The biggest force, Time Warner, clearly has a prominent online face in CNN.com, and it uses content from Time.com there. But it doesn’t seem compelled to have a prominent Web site just for the magazine. Content on Time’s website is largely stories from the magazine, and while there is new content on the site daily, it has a different feel and is not as polished as what appears in the print pages. Some of this, however, may change. Time Inc. is reportedly aiming to use layoffs to free up “more resources for the Web producers at Time.com,” according to Jim Kelly, Time’s managing editor.¹¹

Meanwhile, U.S. News, as we note in the audience section, looks as though it is going to focus more heavily on the Web in coming years. There is a lot of shorter content available on its site, but the publication’s franchise, its rankings and guides, are not free. Some of the opinion journals have dived more heavily into online. National Review has adopted more of a blogging approach to its site, with daily pieces that are generally more casual and personal in tone that one would find in its hard copy.

The most interesting development among the big-news title owners in 2005 may have been how the Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek, handled its acquisition of the online magazine Slate: as a separate entity. The online magazine kept its headquarters in Redmond, Wash. , and its homepage has hardly any indication of who the owner is. Cross-marketing, such as it is, is relegated to the bottom left-hand column, where there may be links to stories in the Post or Newsweek. In fact, perhaps as a nod the site’s audience, the most obvious partner seems to be National Public Radio, which the radio company produces in collaboration with Slate. “Slate on NPR” is a heading on the contents bar running down the left side of the page. In December Slate even ran a piece on anorexia (a recent cover topic for Newsweek) that specifically raised questions about Newsweek’s story.

It would seem that Slate would offer links to the online homes of the Post and particularly Newsweek, which doesn’t have the same prominent Web presence as the newspaper. Of course, the Post and Newsweek have a content agreement with MSNBC, which may have something to do with the lack of Newsweek links on the Slate site (and MSNBC’S co-owner, Microsoft, is the former owner of Slate). There are opportunities for cross-promotion, of course. In December of 2005, the Web sites of the Post, Slate and MSNBC all carried advertisements for MSNBC-TV’s primetime programs all day.¹² But the larger issue may be the Washington Post company’s general Web strategy. The company is careful when it comes to sharing content between outlets. There are, after all, no Newsweek stories on Washingtonpost.com and no Washington Post stories on Newsweek’s site.

The Future

Even with the troubles the traditional news weeklies are experiencing, an ownership shake-up among them is probably unlikely. Despite the downsizing and the plans to move U.S. News to more of an online presence, for example, there has been little talk of Zuckerman Media Properties’ selling the struggling title, though the company did dump the political/pop culture title Radar last year. And even as Time Warner struggles and lays off personnel, no one has suggested that the company has even thought about selling Time, its namesake and the leading news magazine. Still, if the magazine industry continues to flounder, changes in ownership in the long-stable news field in terms of the titles’ form, layout and staffing wouldn’t be a surprise.