With ad pages down at Time magazine, its flagship title, and evidence everywhere that more and more of its younger readers are migrating to the Web, Time Inc. is trying once again to remake itself as a serious, effective player on the Internet. The Wall Street Journal accurately recounts some of the company's earlier failed attempts at putting its valuable content on the Web (anyone remember Pathfinder?), efforts that proved embarrassing as small upstarts all across the globe bested the media giant in the new arena.  Now, says the Journal, senior Time Inc. executives are working feverishly to  dismantle …

In an unsigned Memo Pad column at the usually insightful WWD.com, the question posed yesterday is one asked by many around the magazine world: Why did Condé Nast kill off Cargo without so much as handing it to a different editor, if only to see if the concept--a shopping magazine for men--had any merit?  Troubled, or even tired, magazines at major publishing companies ordinarily will be turned over to fresh editorial leadership. It happens at Condé Nast all the time.  But Ariel Foxman, who was Cargo's launch editor, was never replaced. He was with the book until the very …

In England as in the U.S., magazine executives are dealing daily with the amazing growth of the Internet. It's here, it's going to stay here, and you had better get onboard and figure out how to leverage its power if you're to stay relevant. At least that's the prevailing feeling among industry leaders who are looking to the future. Mike Burgess, the wireless editor of London-based Emap Interactive, this week outlined three key areas of a successful multimedia strategy: community, customization and user-generated content. "Media companies need to stop being like an authority figure and become facilitators," he said. "Integration …

Given newspapers' urgency to adapt fresh reader-grabbing strategies, and in view of the blogosphere's explosive growth, Dave Panos, CEO of a company called Pluck, seems to have stumbled across a "duh" idea. Pluck, just launching, syndicates blog material to newspapers.  This has been done before, of course, but never on so broad a scale.  And there is a difference between Pluck and those outfits that have tried to syndicate blogs in the past. First of all, the company will not confine content to political topics. Everything from food to technology to sports will be in the mix and available …

It's one of those assertions generally whispered in quiet corners at cocktail parties, not spoken of publicly. But this week an industry leader stepped before a crowd of fellow professionals and said it aloud: Owners of big media companies tend to be too old to fully understand and appreciate the vitality of new technologies. Rupert Murdoch's recent high-tech conversion to the contrary, Fru Hazlitt, of Virgin Radio, told a media gathering in the U.K. that it's "bollocks" that media owners can better understand technology by observing their consumers, and she quoted Henry Ford: "If I listened to my customers, I …

It seems a little inside-baseball for a consumer site, but CNNMoney's does a nice job of fleshing out the coming TV upfronts, saying ABC is best positioned to negotiate top rate increases. However, the point that writer Paul La Monica most stresses here is that all of TV is at a point where it finally has no choice but to confront the new, transformative technologies: DVRs, podcasts, online downloads. Time-shifting of television content has the very real possibility of undermining the entire nature of the medium's advertising model. But not yet. That seems to be the prevailing POV in the …

Maybe he's being a party-pooper, but Jon Friedman doesn't think so. A long-time fan of CNBC, he believes a viewer contest currently under way in connection with the channel's popular Squawk Box show will undermine audience respect for NBC Uni's business unit. Friedman believes this couldn't come at a worse time: Not only is CNBC a comparatively small operation in terms of total audience, but it is very likely to be greeted sometime this year by a brand-new competitor from Fox News. Friedman: "I contend that CNBC is playing a dangerous game by messing with its image as a serious …

Bonnie Fuller's hometown newspaper, the Journal News of Westchester County, New York, has an interview with the famous--and oft-reviled-- magazine editor, pegging it to the publication next month of Fuller's long-awaited book, The Joys of Much Too Much.  Fuller says in the interview that, contrary to the widely held belief, women can in fact have it all- motherhood, a rocking career, friendships, and a time to get away from it all. The book focuses more on career advice for young women that it does on its author's life as a star-maker.  Don't go looking here for inside info on …

Time Warner Cable is considering a new channel, called Hits, that would permit subscribers willing to pay an additional $10 a month to watch various network shows immediately following--or possibly the day after --their first airing. The cable giant says it has already held discussions about the concept with ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. "It's just another outlet for customers to do time-shifting," Mark Harrad, a Time Warner Cable spokesperson, says. "It wouldn't necessarily substitute for and could complement DVRs." He also points out that Hits is basically another iteration of what is already being done, although less comprehensively, by …

TheNew Yorker's James Surowiecki, who writes the “Financial Page” column, takes on the beleaguered newspaper industry this week.  He offers no new information, nor barely any fresh thoughts.  But still, because he's Surowiecki and scribbles for the most venerated of America's weeklies, his take is worth reading.  What he points out is that newspapers are indeed in a slow decline, which is why their stocks have tumbled--even though most continue to make impressive profits year in and year out. Wall Street, however, instinctively bets against industries that are thought to represent the past. That very fact alone ought …