Time Warner gets the hell out of the print business—except for DChttp://ift.tt/1eo8I13
Continuing the major media conglomerate’s purge of anything to do with print, Time Warner is ditching the Time part of its name:= and spinning off its magazine holdings. This will leave little old DC Entertainment its ONLY print division.
And you wonder why they are moving to the West Coast?
Time Warner plans to spin off Time Inc., its magazine division, into a new public company in 2014, according to documents filed by the company last week as reported by Bloomberg. The move will complete the divestiture of substantially all the print assets of Time Warner except for DC Comics, a process that was begun in 2006 when the book group, which included Warner Books and Little Brown, was sold to Hachette for $537.5 million (see “Time Warner Book Group Sold”).
Time Warner made the decision to sell its magazines back in March, after discussions with Meredith about creating a new magazine publishing company targeting women, which would have involved some of Time Inc.’s assets. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes spoke of the benefits of the sale in a statement at the time. “A complete spinoff of Time Inc. provides strategic clarity for Time Warner Inc., enabling us to focus entirely on our television networks and film and TV production businesses, and improves our growth profile,” he said. No word on whether “Time” will be removed from the company’s name after the spin-off.
Time covers such well known brands as Time, People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly—many of these major brands which set the agenda in their fields back in the easy old days. No more.
Where will this leave DC as the only Time branch to deal with printers and distributor and so on? I’ve been saying it for years: eventually both DC and Marvel will license out their comics publishing to other companies. It might take two years, it might take 10. Expending a lot of resources on a vertical with such low profit margins doesn’t make sense in the long run.
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