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Media
Time Warner to spin off magazine business, including NME publisher
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 8 March 2013
Time Warner is set to become Time and Warner, with the entertainment firm now planning to spin of its Time Inc magazine publishing business, which includes UK-based NME and Uncut publisher IPC Media, into a separate publicly-listed entity, leaving the Warner side of the company with all the telly programmes and movies.
The split – which parallels a move made by rival News Corp recently, which has also separated its Fox TV and movie business from its newspaper and book publishing interests – follows the news that negotiations by Time Warner to sell some or all of its publishing unit have stalled. Talks had been underway to merge Time Inc with another US media firm Meredith.
The boss of Meredith, Stephen Lacy, yesterday said that a merger of his company with the Time publishing business was still a possibility, though that he respected Time Warner’s decision to prioritise the spinning off of Time Inc in the short term.
Time Inc had already announced a 6% downsizing of its head count before merger and now spin-off talk was on the agenda, a move which will likely result in 150 job losses at IPC. The Warner Music company, of course, has not been part of Time Warner since 2004.
