By Lloyd Grove
DailyBeast.com
His publishing unit is trouble. The spinoff of AOL is at hand. CEO Jeffrey Bewkes talks exclusively with The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove about the future of the media business.
Jeffrey Bewkes seemed eager to unveil a brand-new business strategy for Time Warner Inc., the careworn media giant he’s been running for the past 22 months.
“Actually we’ve been hiding this, and you should be the one to break the news,” Bewkes told me in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. “We are going to buy and roll up all the railroads in the United States. Then we’re going to put flat screens in all of the freight boxcars, because we think that anybody in a recession like this, who’s actually hitching a ride on a boxcar, could become a very loyal viewer of some of our programming. And later, we might be able to sell them something. That’s our theory.”
Warner’s 57-year-old chairman and chief executive was joking, of course—giving his facetious take on the supposed synergy that results from marrying content to distribution. Comcast’s quest to buy NBC Universal is only the latest example. In a wide-ranging conversation, Bewkes also:
– declared himself bullish on Big Media—especially (no surprise here) Time Warner’s prospects and the “branded multichannel cable networks” with distinct programming personalities, such as Fox News, MTV, and HBO.
– suggested that mass-audience broadcast networks such as ABC, CBS, and NBC have a business model that’s “increasingly becoming not viable.”
– reiterated his defense of Time Inc., the company’s troubled publishing unit, and stoutly denied rumors of plans to turn the magazines (with the exception of People and Sports Illustrated) into purely digital enterprises. “Absolutely not,” he said.
– predicted widespread paid content for news Web sites within the next two years. “I think what is not viable—literally not viable—is advertising-support-only free content in journalism.”
Bewkes predicted that people will soon become accustomed to using a variety of technologies, both paid and free, to view movies, read magazines and newspapers, watch television and otherwise consume their favorite media. . . READ FULL STORY
