Time Warner is in talks with the Meredith Corporation to spin off much of Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine empire and the foundation on which the $49 billion media conglomerate was built, Amy Chozick and Michael J. de la Merced write. The deal would move the bulk of Time Inc.’s magazines, including titles like People, InStyle and Real Simple, into a separate, publicly traded company that would include Meredith publications like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. The new company would borrow money to pay a one-time dividend of about $1.75 billion to Time Warner, making the transaction resemble a sale. Time Warner would continue to control the newsmagazines Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and the magazine Money. The deal is one of several options under consideration to reduce Time Warner’s troubled publishing unit.
Many analysts have wondered how a company like Meredith, with a market value of $1.6 billion, could afford to buy a business as big as Time Warner’s non-news magazines, given that Time Warner’s publishing arm reported $3.4 billion in revenue last year. The agreement is possible because what’s being discussed is not really a sale but the formation of a joint venture, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced explain in DealBook. The result would be a publicly traded assemblage of Time Warner titles, like People, and Meredith publications, like Better Homes and Gardens. Shareholders of both conglomerates would be given shares in the new venture. While important details are still being discussed, it appears that Time Warner shareholders would hold about two-thirds of the new company and Meredith shareholders would get the remainder.
Pro-social or purpose-based marketing — persuading consumers that a company operates in a socially responsible manner that appeals to their values, behavior and beliefs — is a growing trend on Madison Avenue. More shoppers say that what a company stands for makes a difference in what they buy, and advertisers have been quick to act on the idea, Stuart Elliott writes. An ad campaign with an estimated $70 million budget to be introduced on Monday by the Panera Bread Bakery restaurant chain is a case in point. The commercials, based on the slogan “Live consciously. Eat deliciously,” will focus on Panera’s positive policies, like donating unsold baked goods, operating donation-based restaurants and working with organizations like Feeding America. The risk of such an approach is that if consumers find a company’s practices at odds with their stated values there could be a backlash.
Mekado Murphy interviews Eugene Gearty, the sound engineer who worked on Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” the allegorical tale of a boy trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger. The film has been nominated for 11 Oscars, two of which are related to sound. Water sounds were of the utmost importance and a particularly challenging sequence involved a school of flying fish landing in Pi’s life raft, Mr. Gearty said.
Mr. Gearty was involved with sounds, but David Magee, the scriptwriter for “Life of Pi,” almost wrote a film that was largely silent, Melena Ryzik writes. Mr. Lee wanted to shoot the entire middle section in silence, but Mr. Magee disagreed. “You would talk to an animal — it’s a natural thing,” he said.
The Knight Foundation said on Twitter that it was a mistake to pay Jonah Lehrer $20,000 to speak at a lunch they held on Tuesday, Julie Moos writes on Poynter’s MediaWire. “Controversial speakers should have platforms,” the foundation wrote in a statement, “but Knight Foundation should not have put itself into a position tantamount to rewarding people who have violated the basic tenets of journalism.”