{"id":219032,"date":"2009-11-06T13:05:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2745923954793947308.post-1546199721426815952"},"modified":"2009-11-06T13:05:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-06T17:05:00","slug":"crunch-time-for-time-warner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/219032","title":{"rendered":"Crunch Time for Time Warner"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Lloyd Grove
DailyBeast.com
<\/span>
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.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Bewkes seemed eager to unveil a brand-new business strategy for Time Warner Inc., the careworn media giant he\u2019s been running for the past 22 months.<\/p>\n

\u201cActually we\u2019ve been hiding this, and you should be the one to break the news,\u201d Bewkes told me in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. \u201cWe are going to buy and roll up all the railroads in the United States. Then we\u2019re going to put flat screens in all of the freight boxcars, because we think that anybody in a recession like this, who\u2019s 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\u2019s our theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s 57-year-old chairman and chief executive was joking, of course\u2014giving his facetious take on the supposed synergy that results from marrying content to distribution. Comcast\u2019s quest to buy NBC Universal is only the latest example. In a wide-ranging conversation, Bewkes also:<\/p>\n

– declared himself bullish on Big Media\u2014especially (no surprise here) Time Warner\u2019s prospects and the \u201cbranded multichannel cable networks\u201d with distinct programming personalities, such as Fox News, MTV, and HBO. <\/p>\n

– suggested that mass-audience broadcast networks such as ABC, CBS, and NBC have a business model that\u2019s \u201cincreasingly becoming not viable.\u201d <\/p>\n

– reiterated his defense of Time Inc., the company\u2019s 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. \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

– predicted widespread paid content for news Web sites within the next two years. \u201cI think what is not viable\u2014literally not viable\u2014is advertising-support-only free content in journalism.\u201d <\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Lloyd GroveDailyBeast.comHis 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\u2019s been running for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4246,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4246"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}