Pearlstine praises Forbes’s user-generated content model. (The company has backed the online channel 120 Sports and has rolled out channels for sports, celebrity news, and business.) Ripp also wants to branch into e-commerce, conferences, and events. Ripp tells me it will be a significant player in video. needed to stop thinking of itself as a magazine company. When Ripp first discussed taking the CEO job with Bewkes, he said that Time Inc. “One of the reasons I have Norman back as my partner and not some kid from Vox is that he understands traditions. “If you have a church and nobody shows up, it doesn’t work so well,” Ripp says. When one AOL executive told him he thought like “an old-media guy,” Ripp reportedly shot back, “Good, because all you new-media guys are going bankrupt.” But both Ripp and Pearlstine now say they have found religion in digital media. During the last dot-com boom, Ripp was known inside Time Warner as being the skeptic. The two men now responsible for charting Time Inc.’s future make for an odd pair of change agents: Ripp is 62 Pearlstine is 71. According to a person briefed on the conversation, Nelson burst out laughing. “Who is it?” Nelson asked, expecting Ripp had recruited a new-media visionary from a web start-up. He couched the move as central to his mission to reinvent the company for the future. “It took me about five seconds to say yes,” Pearlstine says.Īnd so, one morning in late October, Ripp called Nelson into his office and informed her she was being replaced with a chief content officer.
If you don’t like what they’re doing, then you change editors.” A few weeks later, Ripp called Pearlstine with an offer. I just thought that the editors would be much stronger if they felt really responsible for the brands. “It actually infantilized the editors, and they were being second-guessed on everything from cover shoots to whether the covers had too much yellow in them. “I thought there were so many layers in the editor-in-chief job,” Pearlstine says. Pearlstine, who at the time was working at Bloomberg LP as chief content officer, showed none of Nelson’s reservations. “I could not be a part of that,” Nelson told Ripp.īack in New York, Ripp invited Pearlstine to breakfast. It would be a tectonic shift for a company that had all but pioneered the concept of the “church-state” separation of journalism and business. Instead, they would work for the titles’ publishers. In this scenario, magazine editors would no longer report to her. Last summer, he invited Martha Nelson, the editor-in-chief, to his Nantucket home and told her he was thinking of doing away with the editor-in-chief title and creating a chief content officer. And no one seemed to be able to say yes,” Ripp says. “When I came back, I found an organization where almost 8,000 people could say no. Ripp had plans to blow up the Luce culture and was getting resistance.
“Somebody told me if you want to have a fun career, take on the hard job.” Time Inc., he says, “is a hard job.” “I didn’t go to the best school in the world,” Ripp says (he graduated from Manhattan College in the Bronx). Ripp slashed costs, invested in digital, and engineered a sale to a hedge fund. In 2008, he became chairman of the Journal Register Company as the newspaper chain emerged from bankruptcy. After leaving in 2004, he worked as a kind of corporate firefighter running into burning buildings. in 1985 and rose to serve as CFO of Time Inc. Last summer, Bewkes settled on Joe Ripp, a blunt, silver-haired finance executive.
Bewkes first offered the job of CEO to Mike Klingensmith, a former Time Inc. It’s not easy to find people who want to take on management operations like this.
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