Ailing Print Media Department: Time Inc. Cuts More Jobs

The continued fallout and shakedown from the early 21st century’s new media mix is again sparking financial — and jobs — fall out in the print media. Time Inc. will reportedly cut 150 more jobs.

The significance of this increases when you consider that the once-dominant company sliced off 600 jobs last year. The New York Times:

People magazine’s article this week on Britney Spears and her “new guy,� model Isaac Cohen, is five paragraphs long. It was reported and written by seven people.

This is different than most blogs — where mainstream media reporting is quoted or rewritten and commented upon by one person. (Hey, Time…do you want to exchange links?) Back to the NYT:

To be fair, they were long paragraphs. But with layoffs expected this week at Time Inc., which publishes People, such reporter-heavy treatment is headed the way of Kevin Federline, Ms. Spears’s soon-to-be-ex-husband.

Time Inc., the publishing division of Time Warner, is planning to cut more than 150 people, about half of them in editorial jobs across the company’s best-known titles, like People, Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune. The cuts follow about 600 last year, many of them from the company’s business side, and a decision to trim its roster by selling 18 of its roughly 150 titles.

Time Inc.’s top executive, Ann S. Moore, has not yet publicly outlined or discussed the cuts, and she declined to be interviewed for this article. But other executives said that, while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the Internet.

To that end, the story notes, Time is gearing up to prepare for a different future where the coroporation’s bigwigs know that they and the print media in general will be facing a transormed infoworld. Among other things, the Times reports, Time is shifting resources to its websites.

And this paragraph is no joke:

Time Inc. is taking other steps to save money. Within a year or two, most of the company’s corporate offices and magazines at the Time-Life Building in Midtown Manhattan will have moved to lower floors so that the more valuable upper floors can be leased out. Time magazine is shutting some of its bureau buildings overseas, including in Paris, although it expects to maintain “laptop� correspondents, who can work from home.

“They’re amputating in order to save the patient,� said an executive at a competing publishing company.

PERSONAL: My father used to do a lot of the advertising mail printing for Time, Inc. I used to visit the building with him as a kid. One Time-Life Books official often spent time visiting our house. I’ve subscribed to the magazine ever since college. To those not raised on Time, suffice to say never did we think we would EVER see the day when Time would shut bureaus and lease part of its landmark NYC building out.

Some will think blogs are playing a role. Perhaps but it’s not “the” reason.

It’s that the entire news culture — and in the world — is changing. The 24 news cycle has almost been replaced by the instanteous news cycle. Grocery store tabloids once influenced the media, but now (as the tabloids themselves battle competition from Internet gossip sites) the main influence on the media’s news and style seems to be talk radio, cable television talk and news programs featuring talking heads who gab on breaking news topics within minutes. Plus modest little blogs like this that anyone with a computer can view for free (although we always appreciate TIPS in our tipjar but we’re never crass enough to mention it hint hint..)

Time Inc.’s challenges mirror those of the publishing business broadly: its strong brands generate plenty of cash and profit, but have not been growing, a profile that is highly unpopular on Wall Street these days. But, while its biggest competitors, Condé Nast Publications and the Hearst Corporation, are privately held, Time Inc. is part of a publicly traded conglomerate with big holdings in television, film, cable and the Internet and is on a mission to prove itself to restless investors.

Time Inc. still has nearly 11,000 employees worldwide and it is hiring more people at its Web sites, but its overall fate is unclear. When Carl C. Icahn, the financier, waged a brief assault on Time Warner last year, he said the publishing division was ripe for sale or a spinoff because it does not fit with the company’s other businesses.

And it isn’t just Time. Our coblogger Shaun Mullen, a former reporter and editor for the Philadelphia Daily News, has written several posts about the sagging newspaper industry. Those of us who worked in newspapers never thought we would EVER see the day when Knight-Ridder was on the sales block, sold and essentially split into parts.

Those of us in Southern California never thought we would see the day when the Los Angeles Times — still a SUPERB PAPER — would begin to downsize and change its design so it almost looked like my former employer, The San Diego Union-Tribune. The San Diego UT remains a lively, high quality paper but it, too, has reportedly undergone some staff departures by attritution (a friend of mine whose articles we have quoted on this site has taken a buyout and retired).

The print media isn’t dead, it’s ailing. And now its financial and corporate planning doctors must find a fast-working presciption so it can be as strong as possible to battle in the 21st century’s rapidly-changing media mix for marketshare.