When I was a young and odd child, one of the oddest things I did was collect Entertainment Weekly. Our family, like so many middle class families, had always had a subscription to Time, and one day Entertainment Weekly began arriving with it. In those early days, it was called entertainment weekly, and in many ways, it resembled many of the entertainment websites (The A.V. Club, Grantland, Vulture) that dominate the field today. There were long, industry-oriented cover stories, buttressed by surprisingly non-banal interviews with stars, producers, directors, musicians, and authors. The second half of the magazine was divided by medium: Movies, Television, Music, Books and Video, each with its own colored tab. Delightful.
I’d read each issue from cover-to-cover, deciding on its predominant “themes,” and record this data in an elaborate database program on my Apple IIe. As a finishing touch, I’d give each issue a “grade,” emulating EW‘s own, then-novel system of affixing a grade to the media products it reviewed.
In my North Idaho town of 30,000, we had three movie screens and I wasn’t allowed to watch cable. But EW‘s approach to media appealed to me in the way that all broad, detail-oriented taxonomies appeal to children: It provided me with a field to master and the tools to do so. Eleven-year-old me was an expert on the Weinsteins, Sundance, and the phenomena of sex, lies, and videotape and The Crying Game—without ever even seeing the movies, or really even knowing what they were about.
The early and mid-90s Entertainment Weekly was a trade magazine for the masses: A publication that promised to make consumers, whether 11 or 45, into near-experts. It took a while to figure out the format—at first, it was a little too snobby New Yorker and not enough Henry Luce-style middlebrow—but by the mid-90s, it had hit its stride.
But doing what its readers liked and doing what its parent company Time Warner needed did not always, or even often, coincide. Entertainment Weekly premiered just about a month after the completion of the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications in 1990, and they were entrusted to convey to stockholders, to industry observers and to the world that the union of two media empires, with two distinct styles of operation and implicit and explicit goals, was, in fact, an act of corporate genius.
Last year, Time Warner announced its intentions to spin off Time Inc.’s 95 “brands,” 23 of which are U.S. magazines, which include Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly, but also there is NME, Wallpaper, ESSENCE and both Yachting World and Yachting Monthly. (There are also the 50+ international editions of the main properties.) That was the announcement of the end of 23 years of Time Warner’s flailing attempts to create synergy across its sprawling holdings.
Now Time Inc. is on its own. Last week, for the privilege of being dumped, Time Inc. paid Time Warner the amount of $589,858,212.54—leaving the new company with “cash and equivalents” of just $136 million.
EW‘s rise, scattered identity, brilliant heyday and slow, gradual decline mirrors the same journey of Time Warner’s conglomerate hopes and dreams. The leading magazine company weds a film and television giant? It all looked so great on paper. But here we are with the EW of today, and it’s clear: Just because it looks pretty in a business plan doesn’t mean it’s a good idea at all.
I’d read each issue from cover-to-cover, deciding on its predominant “themes,” and record this data in an elaborate database program on my Apple IIe. As a finishing touch, I’d give each issue a “grade,” emulating EW‘s own, then-novel system of affixing a grade to the media products it reviewed.
In my North Idaho town of 30,000, we had three movie screens and I wasn’t allowed to watch cable. But EW‘s approach to media appealed to me in the way that all broad, detail-oriented taxonomies appeal to children: It provided me with a field to master and the tools to do so. Eleven-year-old me was an expert on the Weinsteins, Sundance, and the phenomena of sex, lies, and videotape and The Crying Game—without ever even seeing the movies, or really even knowing what they were about.
The early and mid-90s Entertainment Weekly was a trade magazine for the masses: A publication that promised to make consumers, whether 11 or 45, into near-experts. It took a while to figure out the format—at first, it was a little too snobby New Yorker and not enough Henry Luce-style middlebrow—but by the mid-90s, it had hit its stride.
But doing what its readers liked and doing what its parent company Time Warner needed did not always, or even often, coincide. Entertainment Weekly premiered just about a month after the completion of the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications in 1990, and they were entrusted to convey to stockholders, to industry observers and to the world that the union of two media empires, with two distinct styles of operation and implicit and explicit goals, was, in fact, an act of corporate genius.
Last year, Time Warner announced its intentions to spin off Time Inc.’s 95 “brands,” 23 of which are U.S. magazines, which include Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Entertainment Weekly, but also there is NME, Wallpaper, ESSENCE and both Yachting World and Yachting Monthly. (There are also the 50+ international editions of the main properties.) That was the announcement of the end of 23 years of Time Warner’s flailing attempts to create synergy across its sprawling holdings.
Now Time Inc. is on its own. Last week, for the privilege of being dumped, Time Inc. paid Time Warner the amount of $589,858,212.54—leaving the new company with “cash and equivalents” of just $136 million.
EW‘s rise, scattered identity, brilliant heyday and slow, gradual decline mirrors the same journey of Time Warner’s conglomerate hopes and dreams. The leading magazine company weds a film and television giant? It all looked so great on paper. But here we are with the EW of today, and it’s clear: Just because it looks pretty in a business plan doesn’t mean it’s a good idea at all.
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