Time Inc. is an American New York-based publishing company. It publishes over 90
magazines, most notably its namesake, Time. Other magazines include Sports
Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Life,
Golf Magazine, Southern Living, Essence, This Old House, All You, Real Simple,
and Entertainment Weekly. It also owns the UK magazine house Time Inc. UK,
whose major titles include What's On TV, NME, Country Life, Marie Claire,
Wallpaper* and InStyle. Time Inc. also operates the digital-only titles
MyRecipes, TheSnug, and MIMI. Time Inc. also owns the rights to LIFE,
a well-known magazine that has been published in many different formats.
Time Inc. currently owns and runs LIFE.com, a website dedicated to news
and photography. In 1990, Time Inc. merged with Warner
Communications to form the media conglomerate Time Warner. This merger
lasted until the company was spun off on June 9, 2014.
History Nightly discussions of the concept of a
news magazine led its founders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, both age 23, to
quit their jobs in 1922. Later that same year, they formed Time Inc. Having
raised $86,000 of a $100,000 goal, the first issue of Time was published on
March 3, 1923, as the first weekly news magazine in the United States. Luce
served as business manager while Hadden was editor-in-chief. Luce and Hadden
annually alternated year-to-year the titles of president and
secretary-treasurer. Upon Hadden's sudden death in 1929, Luce assumed
Hadden's position. Luce launched the business magazine
Fortune in February 1930 and created/founded the pictorial Life
magazine in 1934, and launched House & Home in 1952 and Sports Illustrated in
1954. He also produced The March of Time radio and newsreel series. By the mid
1960s, Time Inc. was the largest and most prestigious magazine publisher in
the world. Once ambitious to become Secretary of
State in a Republican administration, Luce penned a famous article in Life
magazine in 1941, called "The American Century", which defined the role of
American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century, and
perhaps beyond. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, aware
that most publishers were opposed to him, issued a decree in 1943 that
blocked all publishers and media executives from visits to combat areas;
he put General George Marshall in charge of enforcement. The main target was
Luce, who had long opposed FDR. Historian Alan Brinkley argues the move
was "badly mistaken", for had Luce been allowed to travel, he would have been an
enthusiastic cheerleader for American forces around the globe. But stranded in
New York City, Luce's frustration and anger expressed itself in hard-edged
partisanship. Luce, supported by Editor-in-Chief T. S. Matthews,
appointed Whittaker Chambers as acting Foreign News editor in 1944, despite the
feuds Chambers had with reporters in the field.
In 1963, recommendations from Time Inc. based on how it delivered magazines led
to the introduction of ZIP codes by the United States Post Office.
Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964,
maintained a position as an influential member of the Republican Party. Holding
anti-communist sentiments, he used Time to support right-wing dictatorships in
the name of fighting communism. An instrumental figure behind the so-called
"China Lobby", he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and
popular sentiment in favor of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and
his wife Soong Mei-ling in their war against the Japanese.
The merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications was announced on March 4,
1989. During the summer of that same year, Paramount Communications launched
a $12.2 billion hostile bid to acquire Time Inc. in an attempt to end a stock
swap merger deal between Time and Warner Communications. This caused Time to
raise its bid for Warner to $14.9 billion in cash and stock. Paramount
responded by filing a lawsuit in a Delaware court to block the Time/Warner
merger. The court ruled twice in favor of Time, forcing Paramount to drop both
the Time acquisition and the lawsuit, and allowing the formation of the two
companies' merger which was completed on January 10, 1990. However, instead of
the companies becoming defunct, the impact of the merger and its resultant
financial shock wave gave off a new corporate structure, resulting in the
new company being called "Time Warner". In 2008, Time Inc. launched Maghound, an
internet-based magazine membership service that featured approximately 300
magazine titles from both Time Inc. brands and external publishing
companies. On January 19, 2010, Time Inc. acquired
StyleFeeder, a personal shopping engine. In August 2010, Time Inc. announced that
Ann S. Moore, its chairman and chief executive, would step down as CEO and be
replaced by Jack Griffin, an executive with Meredith Corporation, the nation's
second-largest publisher of consumer magazines. In September 2010, Time Inc.
entered into a licensing agreement with Kolkata-based ABP Group, one of India’s
largest media conglomerates, to publish Fortune India magazine and the yearly
Fortune India 500 list. On March 6, 2013, Time Warner announced
plans to spin-off Time Inc. into a publicly traded company. Time Warner's
chairman/CEO Jeff Bewkes said that the split would allow Time Warner to focus
entirely on its television and film businesses, and Time Inc. to focus on
its core print media businesses. It was announced in May 2014 that Time Inc.
would become a publicly traded company on June 6 of that year. The spinoff was
completed on June 9, 2014. Time Inc. purchased American Express
Publishing Corporation's suite of titles, including Travel + Leisure, Food
& Wine, Departures, Black Ink and Executive Travel on October 1, 2013.
On 14 January 2014, Time Inc. announced that Colin Bodell was joining the
company in the newly created position of Executive Vice President and Chief
Technology Officer. On 5 February 2014, Time Inc. announced
that it was cutting 500 jobs. However, most of the layoffs are at American
Express Publishing. Since April 2014, the Chairman of Time
Inc. has been Joseph A. Ripp. Ripp has been Chief Executive since September
2013. See also
Fortune Fortune India 500
References External links
Official website Pathfinder