A tipster forwarded us an e-mail that Time Inc. freelancers got this week from JPMorgan, which administers the company's invoicing. Under the cheery subject heading "Time Inc - Accelerate payments at year end!", it outlined the company's PayMeNow program, whereby you can speed up payment of your invoice for a fee, kind of like when you get a payday loan at the check cashing place down on the corner so you can afford to buy lottery tickets for the week. Here's how it works, according to the JPMorgan web site that handles the program:

Pay Me Now

Pay me now allows you to accelerate payments on approved invoices in exchange for a nominal discount. Click the Pay Me Now button next to an invoice to see a prompt with a confirmation page that presents you with an analysis of the early payment opportunity. Included in the analysis is the earliest possible payment date and the associated discount amount.

If you choose to actually get all the money Time Inc. owes you, our tipster says, you usually get it within a month. But if you want it faster, here is the payment schedule—on the left are the number of days you have to wait to get paid, on the right is the portion Time Warner will skim off the top for the service.

• 25 days - 0.5 percent
• 20 - 1 percent
• 15 - 1.5 percent
• 10 - 2 percent
• 5 - 3 percent
• 3 - 4 percent

No word yet on whether the payments are in dollars or "Time Incgots" redeemable at your nearest company store.

Given how desperate freelancers are to be PAID NOW, largely because companies like Time Inc. never pay them on time, this is a pretty genius idea. In fact, if you take it to its logical conclusion, Time could just pay its freelances nothing instantly, thereby significantly reducing its content costs.

Here's the full e-mail urging Time Warner's freelancers to take advantage of this amazing offer!

Happy Holidays!

If you are receiving this email, you are the JPMorgan Xign administrator and you, or someone from your organization, is submitting electronic invoices or receiving electronic payments via the JPMorgan Xign solution on behalf of Time Inc. I apologize for the blind distribution but I wanted to protect everyone's privacy while sharing this important information.

As year end approaches I wanted to ensure that you were aware of the PayMeNow functionality, which allows you to _accelerate payment for invoices that have already been approved_ by TIME. This is an excellent tool to help with your cash management at year end! This does not change your payment term on future invoices, it simply accelerates the payment on the ones you specifically request.

* If you are receiving this email, it means you have approved invoices that are pending payment and can be accelerated for payment this week or any day before year end. *

* *

This is a purely optional service that is available to you by following these easy steps:

1) Log into your JPMorgan Xign account at xign.net.

2) Look for the green $$ and click the link.

3) This will display all available invoices

4) Either select the fastest date to be paid, or select "Lower rates" to schedule payment later in the month, but still before your year end.

Thanks very much and please let me know if you have additional questions related to cash acceleration. For all other inquires, please contact our Support Team at 800 485 XXXX.

Sincerely,

Linda Piazza

JPMorgan

Vice President, Relationship Management

[Photo via Flickr by Taber Andrew Bain.]

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong (pictured) said in a memo to staff (below) that the company is looking to lose 2,500 workers, or a third of its total staff. He'll be forgoing his own 2009 bonus, and is offering executives up to nine months pay if they volunteer for buyouts, according to Business Insider. Interestingly, rank and filers are being offered a weaker deal than their recent colleagues over at Time Inc.; AOL will pay them three months severance, whereas Time Inc.-ers get that plus two weeks for every year of service. Apparently unions are nice things to have in situations like this.

As it prepares to offer shares to the public next month, AOL has been on a diet plan in other ways, too:

• After steady increases, ad revenue from a deal with Google started falling this year, according to Peter Kafka at All Things D. The deal provided $700 million in ad revenue last year, about one third of the total, but was off $42 million in the most recent quarter.
• AOL surrendered bustling celebrity-news site and cable network TMZ to Time Warner; Tim Armstrong said as recently as July that he hoped to "actively" discuss whether to retain TMZ with Time Warner and that "‘If the value of TMZ increases, it's a really good thing for us."
• AOL may sell MapQuest, according to Kara Swisher at All Things D.

Pic above by Yaniv Golan.

Armstrong's memo to staff:————-

AOLers –

"Employees First" is the way that we have run the company since April and that mantra is something I take very seriously because our company is a collection of people and our brands are the work of our teams. We started by working together to determine AOL's strategy, then the correct structure for the strategy, and, as we have discussed, we are now faced with making sure we have the correct cost structure for the strategy. You have seen daily and weekly updates on Project Everest and many of you have been involved in trying to align our resources to maximize AOL's opportunity.

AOL's cost structure is something we have worked on for the past four months, and we have spent hundreds of hours reviewing ways to fix the cost structure as well as the revenue growth engine. As we are coming to the conclusion of this work over the next few weeks, it is clear that we will need to have a significant reduction of costs at the company and across almost all functional areas and geographies. Headcount costs are going to be a majority of the cost reduction recommendations coming out of Project Everest.

As I mentioned in our last Project Everest update, the idea for a voluntary layoff was suggested and we agree that it is an option that gives people more choice and decision-making ability instead of waiting for the final cost recommendations and involuntary layoffs. Starting December 4th in the United States and ending a few days after we spin out from Time Warner, we will allow employees to choose a voluntary exit from AOL. Additionally, tomorrow we anticipate beginning the communication process for voluntary layoff programs in certain international locations. We will be looking for up to 2,500 volunteers. For context on the target volunteer number, over the next several months we will be looking to reduce approximately one-third of our overall workforce at the company. We will need to do an involuntary layoff if we do not reach the target numbers through the voluntary option.

The reduction in costs is aimed at making AOL competitive for the future of the Web and it will allow us to focus the company on growth in the non-access areas of the business. After the cost reductions, we will have a company that is aligned and structured to drive our strategy in a competitive way. The number of potential reductions isn't aimed at getting us through 2010; it is aimed at resetting AOL at the correct baseline for the future.

As a member of our team and the person who takes accountability for the results of the company, I am making the decision to forego my 2009 bonus. That decision is a personal one and is not a sign for the future payout of the overall bonus plan for employees. That plan is based on performance and overall company outcomes and it will be management's recommendation to the compensation committee of the Board to approve our performance-based bonus payouts for 2009. These are challenging times and today's news is difficult. But every day we are making changes and progress and we are on our way to re-engineering AOL for success. – TA

Time Warner's jets have been on the market since at least December 2008, nearly a year ago. That was just after Time Warner's Time Inc. announced the layoff of 600 staff. In February, we called on the media conglomerate to sell its four Gulfstreams, which we estimated were worth a combined $124 million, roughly, based on used jet listings at the time.

But all those jets are still registered in the company's name, according to FAA records; CityFile is reporting that the company still owns at least three of them, and has now echoed our suggestion that they be sold. Sure, it's a buyer's market for corporate jets, but Time Warner can't cut prices enough to move one of these? We wonder if the company isn't keeping prices high on purpose, a trick described by the Economist:

According to analysts at JPMorgan, asking prices for used jets actually rose by 3.4% in the year to November [2008]. Jonathan Breeze, chief executive of Jet Republic, a private-jet operator, suggests that some announcements that firms are selling their jets are "elaborate window dressing". By putting jets up for sale at a high price that ensures nobody will buy, companies can appear frugal-even as their bosses continue to fly as usual.

But we are having a hard time imagining media moguls putting their own personal status-symbol luxuries ahead of the welfare of their workers. Ha ha, kidding!

November 4, 2009

To: Time Warner Colleagues

From: Jeff Bewkes

Subject: Innovating for Future Success

We've had a lot of good news this past quarter, despite the tough economy. Our financial performance exceeded expectations and kept us on track to post solid results for the full year. So we have raised our business outlook for 2009. We also expect to spin off AOL by the end of the year and become a more content-focused media company. In addition, we're making strong progress on our key operating objectives. Our financial and strategic successes give me confidence that we'll be well positioned to drive steady and attractive returns to shareholders next year and into the future.

In the third quarter, our overall adjusted OIBDA was 9% lower than in the same period last year. But, importantly, our Content Group businesses that will soon make up the new Time Warner – Turner, HBO, Warner Bros. and Time Inc. (along with TWX corporate) – generated adjusted OIBDA that was about even with the year-ago quarter and up 2% for the first nine months of the year. In light of these relatively strong results, we increased our business outlook for 2009 adjusted earnings per share (adjusted EPS) to at least $2.05, up from our previous outlook of around $1.98. Also, for the first time, we provided a full-year adjusted EPS outlook for our Content Group – at least $1.75 in 2009, compared to $1.42 last year. (Please click here to read the press releases.)

As I've mentioned before, we have four operating objectives to drive the profitability of our core content businesses:
· Leveraging our scale and brands to deliver compelling content consistently;
· Continuing to improve the efficiency of our operations to maintain our competitive advantage;
· Expanding internationally; and
· Developing new business models to capitalize on shifting technologies in a way that both benefits consumers and builds on our successful business models.

Let me highlight that last objective here. Time Warner has a long tradition of building businesses on new technologies to provide consumers with the choice and convenience they want – from pay television at HBO and CNN's around-the-clock news to the leadership at Turner and HBO in video on demand (VOD) and Warner Bros.' launch of DVDs.

We're extending that record of innovation throughout Time Warner. For example, we're advancing TV Everywhere even faster than I expected. As you know, TV Everywhere is an industry initiative to allow those who subscribe to TV in their homes to watch their favorite programs at no extra charge on a wide range of other devices. Consumers get more for their money, and the industry benefits from expanding its current business model to the Internet. There are several trials underway with major distributors, with additional distributors and programmers planning to join. We're also developing the technological tools to ensure TV Everywhere is a seamless user experience.

Looking ahead, we'd like to develop a similar model for the publishing industry. As e-readers and other mobile technologies become more sophisticated and popular, consumers will want magazine content available conveniently on a range of these devices. So it's an exciting opportunity for Time Inc. and the rest of the industry to give consumers the content they want, when and how they want it – while growing both circulation and advertising revenue.

Among other innovations going on around the company, Turner last month launched the new CNN.com. It's been totally redesigned to make it more visually compelling and to integrate more video and such features as a new opinion section and partnerships with Oprah.com, PEOPLE and Entertainment Weekly. The press reviews have been very positive, and we look for CNN.com to extend its leadership as the #1 destination for online and wireless news.

Another example is a recent VOD trial that Warner Bros. conducted with Comcast in Atlanta. In a first for a major studio, Warner Bros. released two films – Observe and Report and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – on VOD for cable subscribers several days before they were put out on DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. This VOD trial not only offered consumers more options to see the movies, but it also helped promote the sale of their DVDs themselves.

These are challenging but exciting times for Time Warner. As a content-focused company, I believe that we'll be better able than ever to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies. At our core, of course, we're about great content. So I'll close by congratulating the winners of our 34 Primetime Emmys at Turner, Warner Bros. and HBO, which won the most of any network for the seventh straight year. As always, I appreciate your dedication and hard work.

In addition to loving to see Time Warner under his control, Turner tells Bloomberg, he would specifically like to have CNN and Cartoon Network brass call him boss. The cause-drawn mogul has become increasingly critical of CNN's "tabloid" attitude and again says that he would like to see the channel, which he founded in 1980, increase its international news coverage. Or, at least, stop featuring so much "fluff." What, like the balloon boy?

As for Cartoon Network: Turner insists kids don't need Superman's silly sense of honor and heroics. No, they need important lessons, like those espoused by the environmentally-friendly Captain Planet, who, by the way, was really very awesome. But we digress.

Turner's never been one to keep things simple, so he also muses about those evil, wasteful newspapers: "You're chopping all these trees down and making paper out of them and trying to deal with all the waste paper. It's the biggest solid waste problem that we have." So, even though likes Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, we're assuming Turner would like to see all news online, which could, some may argue, only increase electrical consumption and a new type of waste.

This is all well and good, but Turner doesn't understand that even if we do cleanse the earth of pollution, war and all that nasty shit, then his preferred networks will have no programming. It's a classic 21st century media mogul's Catch-22.

Armstrong, the former Google advertising chief (pictured), jettisoned some top lieutenants from AOL, the internet conglomerate, last month. Beyond that, he's believed to be planning major job cuts as part of a sweeping reorganization of the company. "AOL is not going to change itself by incremental movements," Armstrong recently told PaidContent. Asked if this meant "large cuts," he talked about going "deep into the employee organization... to come up with ways to structure the company... I would expect announcements about that by early next year."

Early next year would mean just after the spinoff from Time Warner, assuming it goes forward as expected late this year. An AOLer who attended a recent internal "Town Hall" meeting on the restructuring, dubbed Project Everest, confirmed the layoffs are planned for post-spinoff.

One explanation we've heard for that timing is that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes didn't want layoffs taking place while AOL was part of his company. That makes some sense — layoffs typically carry a price tag, and Time Warner presumably doesn't want to take the hit for a move that will benefit another company over the long term. Time Warner isn't taking on debt as part of the transaction, our AOL tipster said, which jibes with the media conglomerate's statements that it is AOL that might load up on debt as part of the spinoff.

But a delayed deep restructuring means uncertainty for investors considering what to do with AOL shares in the earliest days of tradubg, which in turn means a potentially depressed price. A weak re-debut for AOL shares would not bode well for a company that has already had more than its share of struggles. Then again, if anyone can sell uncertainty, it's a consummate salesman like Armstrong.

UPDATE: 3:38 pm ET: Post updated with comments from an AOLer.

Craig Whitney, the man who kept all the thug motherfuckers in check as the Standards Editor of the New York Times, is retiring after more than four decades at the paper. You can read a very gracious speech about him by Bill Keller by clicking here, or just read this excerpt, which is Whitney's career highlight:

And along with Phil Corbett, his successor, he has worried about all the words that appear not only in the paper but, now, on the web (a recent exchange with a department head involved the appearance of the word "pooping" in one of our sites).

Poop well in whatever you move on to, Mr. Whitney.


Just like in America, Russia has cranky old ex-military wingnuts. But over there they seem to have slightly more influence! Example: Someone wrote a story ("media" peg alert!) about a kabob house called the "Anti-Soviet Kabob House." Uproar ensued amongst Soviet wingnuts! Somebody else wrote about how ridiculous this was and now he's subjected to even more intense wingnuttery, to the point where his life may be in danger. The moral of the story is, God Bless America, where our wingnuts kill journalists less often than their wingnut counterparts elsewhere do.


Is Time Inc. for sale? No, says Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. He said at a conference that they'd still have it five years from now. Although if he could go back in time two years and sell it he totally would, in a flash.


Boy, the magazine industry sure isn't going to let Apple come between it and its readers, like Apple did to the music industry with iTunes. No way. The magazine industry wants to make its own iTunes-type thing, to cut out the middleman, and grab the dough. Well, you know how it is. Five years from now you walk back into the same bar and there's the magazine industry, sitting on the same stool, sipping the same beer, still talking about how it's gonna make that awesome new iTunes thing for magazines. Good luck, guys.

The Village Voice talks to recent Columbia J-school grads to figure out what the fuck they were thinking, going to J-school. "I might be crazy, but I'm optimistic," says one. That sums it all up.


The Food Network is doing great! Not doing so great: the restaurant industry. Soon all food will be consumed via television.


Media conglomerate news: the bankrupt Tribune Co. could exit bankruptcy as early as the end of this year! If, uh, all goes well; The AP got rid of 100 staffers, with buyouts; Media profits at McGraw-Hill and Time Warner were down significantly; and Viacom had a bad quarter, but they're "hopeful." Let's all be!


As predicted, the crazy saga of Daily News reporter Adam Rubin being accused of fishing for a job with the Mets has sparked a discussion about journalistic job-fishing! Everybody does it, says D. Carr. Kelly McBride offers some incredibly easy ethical guidelines. And every sports reporter in New York is on Rubin's side, because they could be next.

The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Karnitschnig imagines the company, including the still-proud journalists at Time Inc., as the pet of Rupert Murdoch, or perhaps of some dreary cable television provider like Comcast or DirecTV.

Maybe. As troubled as the AOL division was, it at least hypothetically had growth potential Time Warner's remaining divisions don't offer. But it's safe to say Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (pictured) isn't going to sell to Murdoch without some ironclad protection against getting shanked by Murdoch's MySpace CEO Jon Miller, who Bewkes has repeatedly screwed over.

In retrospect, AOL's deal to acquire — and then be run by — Time Warner marked the end of a century when old media conglomerates were at their peak. The merger, valued at $182 billion when it was announced, was the largest in U.S. history. It is also arguably the most disastrous in history. The combined value of the two companies — both inflated by the dot-com bubble — was $350 billion. Today, before the spin-off goes through, the whole shebang sports a market cap of just under $28 billion.

Now that the struggling old media company is parting ways with its fast-shrinking internet toy, the media's hand-wringing over the deal nine years ago looks absurdly hubristic in retrospect.

Here are some quotes from early 2000, after the deal was announced (and about a year before it was consummated):

• New York Times: A "merger of tree-snapping behemoths... the Godzilla of the Internet... wed the King Kong of content. It is a natural time for the other denizens of the jungle to wonder what the future will hold for the colossal couple and the world they inhabit."
  
• USA Today: "It's one of those rare events that seems to change the world overnight... We're shocked... "
  
• Newsweek: "AOL Time Warner will be unchallenged in its online customer base and hold vast cable-television assets."
• Regional telco SBC Communications, as quoted in CBS Marketwatch: "The merger will establish, through a web of equity and contractual interests, one interlocking conglomerate with control over both the high-speed pipes consumers use to connect to the Internet and the content they access once they're online."
• Salon, April Fool's Day: "AOL Time Warner announced Friday that it had acquired France."

There were some pessimists; a columnist named Paul Krugman wrote that only time would tell about the wisdom of the deal, and that it's possible " some big businessmen have just made a very big mistake."

Instead of fearsome tentacles everywhere, Time Warner is now left with the old-line business it was in before the 2000 deal. Except those assets — cable networks, a movie studio, magazines — now face more obstacles to growth than they did eight years ago.

AOL chief Tim Armstrong, the former Google sales chief, finally has his own company to run; it remains to be seen whether he can reverse AOL's steadily declining advertising revenues. But it's Time Warner that's left with the tougher job: Proving media conglomerates can still post impressive growth amid the rise of online media consumption.

IAC lost $28.4 million this quarter on weak advertising. Perhaps pumping millions into the Daily Beast and not really worrying too much about selling ads to get money coming back to you, to make up for the money you spent, is not a profitable business strategy? It's much too early to tell.
[But kudos to Diller's PR person for getting that puffy interview placed in USA Today on earnings day! Good distraction work!]

And let's talk about Time Warner! Its overall profit was down 14% this quarter, so it's going to spin off AOL to get rid of that dead weight. But what about its other dead weight: Time Inc, the illustriouscrediblest magazine company in America??

Time Inc's ads are down 30% this quarter. That is just monstrous. To put that in perspective for you: that's as bad as newspaper companies did this quarter. When you're a magazine company losing ads as fast as newspaper companies, you are not doing well. Subscription revenues also fell 16%.

Maybe they'll make up that gap by selling their online content? No, they won't. Bad times.

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.

And not just regular sad, but emoticon sad. ":(", he wrote on Twitter:


Fitting that Case, whose company popularized instant messaging, is using IM lingo on Twitter, a service his former company could have built in-house with a trivial amount of effrot. (Imagine if those IM status updates, instead of being displayed on a buddy list, were broadcast to the Web.) It's an example of the "lost decade" Case refers to: Years of languorously chasing deals instead of pursuing innovation.

Yet his plaintive tweets obscure the issue: Case oversaw AOL for more than half of this "lost decade." After AOL bought Time Warner in 2001, he became chairman, and stayed on for a contentious two years. He remained on its board for another two and a half years. Why is he sad when he should be mad — at himself?

Well, it's not "the future" so much as... we wanted to say something more clever than "the past," but in a sense it is "the past." Time Warner is the Platonic ideal of the massive, multi-tentacled, omnipresent media corporation. And in 1989, that sounded like a fabulous idea. Here's what was said at the time:

AP 3/4/89
"There's never been a deal like this in the media business. This is going to be a frighteningly powerful company," said John S. Reidy, an analyst at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc.

LAT 3/5/89
Some analysts expressed surprise that Warner sought the merger, because they believe its stock value could appreciate more rapidly on its own. But one analyst called the move a "career capper" for the 61-year-old [Steven J.] Ross, who co-founded Warner in 1961.

Ross rose from managing "parking lots . . . and now he is the head of the greatest media company in the world. I mean, give me a break!" said one securities analyst.

And Time Warner was frighteningly powerful!

NYT 3/5/89
The merger would insure Time Warner a place in the 1990's as one of a handful of global media giants able to produce and distribute information in virtually any medium. The companies said the deal would help the United States compete against major European and Asian companies...

An analyst for Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., John Reidy, called the deal ''mind-boggling.''

''What you've got is a company that will be the largest magazine publisher in the country, the world's most profitable record company, a cable television entity with more than 5.5 million cable subscribers, one of the world's largest book-publishing operations and the country's largest supplier of pay-cable programming,'' he said.

So Time Warner had a pretty good run. The AOL deal was a killer, but in 1989, that was far in the future. The combo that was so "mind-boggling" at the time did its job well for a while. But the internet killed Time Warner in more than just the AOL way. Decentralization. Lowering of barriers to entry to the media. Virtually free and instantaneous publishing. More free content than you could ever see. And the music industry, you know. None of these developments are particularly good for the "behemoth" model. The future is smaller and quicker. As intent as those guys were 20 years ago to assemble Time Warner, they better be equally intent to take it apart today. TWX stock is now about a tenth as valuable as it was a decade ago. And for Time Warner, they'll never see a decade like that last one again.

Media earnings news: Time Warner posted write-down losses of more than $24 billion in the fourth quarter, thanks to plummeting values at its cable and magazine businesses, and at AOL. 1,250 layoffs TK. And Disney's disappointing earnings this quarter made its stock sink further today. But Bob Iger found a shiny nickel on the sidewalk!


The Washington Post will no longer pay employees extra for things like online chats, videos, and blogs. Eh.

The Daily Beast started out really strong! Now traffic is down. But Tina Brown still has millions of dollars to burn before they think about folding, so have no fear! This whole situation gives Michael Wolff an excuse to give triumphal quotes. For some reason!


Oh, we've located a sector of the media that's not doing horrendously: locally owned alt-weeklies in small markets. Congratulations to them! In contrast, the Village Voice is a non-locally owned alt-weekly in a large market, and we hear that there was a manhole cover explosion outside its offices today. This is all connected.



A tipster sends us this screen grab to point out: the LA Times now has no compunction about letting the New York Times plant ads all over its site. Where's yer ballz, Zell?!?!

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune filed for bankruptcy last night, in a thoroughly expected move. Whose fault is this? The crazy economy and the industry at large, according the paper's private equity owners. No, it's the stupid private equity owners themselves, says an economist. Hey, don't argue, you're both right. This is a "reorganization," so, like Tribune, the paper is going to try to get their affairs in order and stay in business. It's the biggest paper in Minnesota, so let's hope they come up with something. Can you save them, Garrison Keillor?

Your daily layoff roundup: 30 employees at O'Reilly Media, a publisher of tech-related books; and, we hear from a tipster (unconfirmed), massive ad agency McCann Erickson laid off more than 50 employees this morning.

Another rumor: Washington Post editor Marcus Brauchli is going to try to eliminate the paper's Book World section for budgetary reasons. Luckily most citizens of DC are functionally illiterate. [Critical Mass]


Time Warner says it's "not averse" to selling off Time Inc., if they can find somebody out there who would like to pay them a whole lot of money for it, because they could really use a whole lot of money, thx. [Marketwatch]

Al Jazeera finally has a national syndication deal in the US. It will run some content on "Worldfocus," which is syndicated via PBS to most major US markets. It ain't great, but it's better than the just-about-nobody who could watch Al-Jazeera before. Maybe this will make jobs for reporters, somehow! [Reuters]


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is losing a million bucks a week. Christ. [Fresh Loaf]

The terms of the deal weren't disclosed — Viacom initially sought a 23 cent-per-subscriber boost, amounting to about $39 million — though the LAT confirms that the consumer-fueled, call-center fury influenced a swift resolution to keep SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park and Dora the Explorer on the air. The bad news: A new episode of The City airs Sunday night at 10. Call Viacom with your complaints this time around — it's only fair.

• Viacom, Time Warner Cable settle contract dispute [LAT]

Viacom wanted TW to pay higher fees to get stations like Nickelodeon, VH1, MTV, and Comedy Central. TW was like "no, we'll just take your stations off the air starting January 1, so there." Of course there was no chance that this would last any real length of time, because Viacom really needs all that sweet Time Warner cash and Time Warner is not about to listen to the millions of you who would be placing angry calls to their customer support line whining about Jon Stewart and Spongebob and the visible holes their absence leaves in our sad, media simulacra of lives. So of course they have now caved and come to an agreement without any interruption of these particular stations of flickering pictures.

All is well. [Pic via]

Ensnared in a vicious battle over 23 cents per customer, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Daily Show, South Park and the rest of Viacom's cable offerings may vanish tonight for 13 million Time Warner subscribers.

When the ball drops at midnight in Times Square, so has Viacom pledged to yank the plug on 19 channels along the TWC system if the cable provider doesn't re-up its contract with a $35.9 million increase in its carriage fee. The bump amounts to 23 cents per Time Warner subscriber, which Viacom says is a long-overdue remedy to the carrier undervaluing its content.

We'll say! We've long considered Spike's mind-numbing cocktail of UFC tilts and Late Night Strip to be one of television's finest narcotic bargains, but TWC isn't convinced. Nevertheless, Team Redstone clearly intends to win its battle for your quarter, waving fierce numbers at the AP ("Americans spend a fifth of their TV time watching Viacom shows but its fees make up less than 2.5 percent of the Time Warner cable bill") and, according to the Wall Street Journal, launching a media campaign featuring a despondent SpongeBob and Dora the Explorer.

Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, CMT, TV Land and their knock-off subsidiaries would be looped into the strike, with each channel's respective Web site interrupting visitors today with a pop-up ad encouraging them to lobby TWC with an appeal. And why not? New Colbert episodes start next week, and really, who among us has the fortitude to miss the next installment of Bromance on Sunday? Oh. OK, well besides you..

• 'Colbert,' 'SpongeBob' may go dark on Time Warner [AP]

The problem with lists of billionaires' paper losses, like the one Henry Blodget's Business Sheet has assembled, is that they're frustratingly free of context. Did a particular CEO do anything to make his company's shares worthless, or was he just buffeted willy-nilly by the crashing stock market? Is Rupert Murdoch $3.5 billion poorer because he's a bad manager, or just unlucky? Instead, we're left knowing that they own many millions of shares in their companies and those shares are, ohmigod, totally worth less now than they were last January! That's about as much fun as reading companies' annual proxy statements.

What this list needs is a dose of schadenfreude. Here's an edited version, including only those people we really are happer to see poorer:

• Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, -$3.3 million: Totally deserved, for installing Randy Falco, a useless broadcast-network flunky, as CEO of AOL, thereby destroying whatever remaining value the Internet portal had.
• Roger Ailes, head of Fox's local TV stations and Fox News Channel, -$3.5 million: This News Corp. executive deserves a net worth chop — not for the maddeningly popular Fox News, but for the laughably unwatched CNBC wannabe he championed, Fox Business Network.
• James Dolan, Cablevision scion, -$13.1 million: Bought Newsday, and then gave an interview to a company-owned cable network rather than to the newspaper, which, frankly, could use some help filling column-inches.
• Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., New York Times publisher, -$76.7 million: Almost let the Times run out of cash so his cousins could keep getting paid millions of dollars in dividends by the family-owned paper. Also, rumored to be in annoying relationship with Caroline Kennedy.
• Sam Zell, CEO, Tribune Co., -$315 million (maybe): Zell might lose his investment in the bankrupt Tribune — but he's not out nearly as much as his employees, whose stock-ownership plan was used to buy the newspaper-and-TV conglomerate.

Here's the whole list. Bravo if you can make it to the end — at which point you will learn that you never really cared about EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen, the richest media mogul you've never heard of and for good reason. Also, you'll wonder why media CEOs aren't more photogenic.

(Photos via the Business Sheet; clockwise from upper left: Bewkes, Sulzberger, Zell, Dolan, Ailes)