Time Inc.
Time Inc. was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden. Based in New York City, the company owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake Time, Sports Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Life, Golf Magazine, Southern Living, Essence, Real Simple, and Entertainment Weekly. It also operated subsidiaries alongside Time Inc. UK, whose major titles included What's on TV, NME, Country Life, and Wallpaper. Additionally, Time Inc. managed over 60 websites and digital-only titles, such as MyRecipes, Extra Crispy, TheSnug, HelloGiggles, and MIMI.
In 1990, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to form the media conglomerate Time Warner, with Time Inc. continuing as a subsidiary. In 2014, to focus on its three entertainment divisions, Warner Bros., Turner, and HBO, Time Warner spun off Time Inc. as a public company trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2018, the Meredith Corporation acquired Time Inc. for $2.8 billion. Three yars later, Meredith was acquired by IAC and merged with Dotdash to form Dotdash Meredith, resulting in IAC gaining most of the former Time Inc. assets.
History
Beginnings
Nightly discussions regarding the concept of a news magazine led founders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, both age 23, to quit their jobs in 1922. Later that year, they formed Time Inc. Having raised $86,000 of a $100,000 goal, they published the first issue of Time on March 3, 1923, marking the debut of the first weekly news magazine in the United States. Initially, Luce served as business manager while Hadden acted as editor-in-chief, with the two alternating the titles of president and secretary-treasurer anually. Upon Hadden's sudden death in 1929, Luce assumed his partner's position.Growth
Luce launched the business magazine Fortune in February 1930 and created/founded the pictorial Life magazine in 1936, 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 wrote 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 T. S. Matthews, appointed Whittaker Chambers as acting Foreign News editor in 1944, despite the feuds Chambers had with reporters in the field.
In the 1950s, the Time Inc. executive Brumbaugh made presentations to the Post Office Department to explain how Time Inc. was using a zoning system to speed the delivery of its magazines. Although the Post Office Department had instigated zones in 1943, they were inconsistently applied. As cited in FYI, Time Inc.'s internal newsletter Fewer than 40% of the cities were properly zoned,' he recalls. 'I went to the Post Office Department and showed them how we were making the zone system work. In 1963, the United States Post Office introduced ZIP codes.
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.. Time Inc. later acquired Boston-based Little, Brown and Company for $17 million in January 1968.
Time Inc. also owned pioneering cable network Home Box Office.
In 1974, Time Inc. launched the celebrity-focused magazine People.
In February 1985, Time Inc. announced that it would acquire the Birmingham, Alabama-based Southern Progress Corporation, publishers of the Southern Living magazine for $480 million.
In 1987, Time Inc. and Robin Wolaner launched the parent-focused magazine ''Parenting''
Merger with Warner Communications and Time Warner ownership
In 1987, Time Inc. lost its ownership stake in the USA Network, which it held since 1981. 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. Effectively, Time took over Warner, resulting in a new corporate structure and the new combined company being called "Time Warner" with Time remaining as a subsidiary of said company.In November 1990, Time Inc. announced that it would acquire the remaining stake in Hippocrates Partners.
The Pathfinder website was launched in 1994, with content from the Time, People and Fortune magazines. It was shut down in 1999.
On October 20, 2000, Time Inc. announced that it would acquire the magazine division of Times Mirror Company that includes Field & Stream, Golf Magazine, Outdoor Life, Popular Science, Skiing and Yachting from the Tribune Company for $475 million, the merger was subsequently completed in November of that year, forming Time4Media
In January 2005, Time Inc. announced that it would purchase a remaining stake in New York City-based Essence Communications, publishers of the Essence magazine that it not already own.
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. Griffin was ousted after a brief tenure, eventually being replaced by Laura Lang, who served about a year.
Split
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 spin-off was completed on June 9, 2014. As of September 13, 2016, Rich Battista was promoted to president and CEO, replacing Joseph A. Ripp.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 January 14, 2014, Time Inc. announced that Colin Bodell was joining the company in the newly created position of executive vice president and chief technology officer. However, he was let go May 19, 2016 On February 5, 2014, Time Inc. announced that it was cutting 500 jobs with most of the layoffs at American Express Publishing. From April 2014 to mid-2017, the Chairman of Time Inc. was Joseph A. Ripp, who had been Chief Executive since September 2013 and continued as Executive Chairman when replaced as CEO by Battista. Though Ripp had intended to remain Executive Chairman until 2018, he wound up leaving the board in 2017 and John Fahey served as non-executive chairman for the months prior to the company's sale to Meredith. On May 28, 2015, Time Inc. announced the purchase of entertainment and sports news site FanSided. In July 2015, Time Inc. acquired League Athletics in Tucson, SportsSignup in Saratoga Springs, and in Los Alamitos. The three companies will be a part of Sports Illustrated Play.
After attempting a few TV shows in 2014 and 2015, the company formed Time Inc. Productions in 2016 as its in-house production company. On February 11, 2016, Time Inc. announced that it has acquired Viant, a leading people based marketing platform and owner of MySpace. With the purchase of Time Warner by AT&T, it was agreed that Time Warner television assets such as HBO also came under the AT&T umbrella; after WarnerMedia spun off from AT&T in 2021, these assets came under the fold of Warner Bros. Discovery.