• by John Gaffney , April 15, 2003

What's In A Name?: Plenty. AOL TimeWarner has three distinct companies included on its corporate moniker now, and its time to drop one. Here's why. AOLTW has three constituencies. All three have equal value, in my opinion. The first is Main Street. You can't fault the company for building and maintaining products that continue to hit home with all kinds of consumers from Teen People to In Style. The second is the media community. On an individual media property basis, the company has done a good job of giving planners and buyers the right properties with the right data and the right CPMs, from what I know. Where this junction of companies has failed miserably is on Wall Street. So in order to let a company named AOL TimeWarner function better, I would drop the name AOL. It shows a new attitude to Wall Street. It shows that AOL is a division of the company that is a media power, not a calling card for a bad deal. It is not just a matter of semantics. So when the company announces earnings next week, and sometime between now and then you hear that they dropped AOL from the name of the new building, the business cards and the stock name, don't be shocked.

Dan, Tom, Peter And Gulf War II: Why are we surprised that network news took a beating during the fading conflict in Iraq? According to The New York Times, in the first 16 days of the war with Iraq, "the networks not only saw the gains of the first days vanish, they in fact suffered a drop-off from the average viewership during the preceding weeks of the television season." The amount of viewers not tuning into the networks might have been a shock to some, but I think network news - especially its prime time slot - needs to reinvent itself to recapture its immediacy for consumers.

At The Buzzer: Although he was named in the lawsuit filed yesterday as one of the executives alleged to have engaged in insider trading, I don't think for a minute that AOL chairman Richard Parsons should be asked to resign. Nor should he be judged before having a proper hearing. Shouldn't the media business and the public apply the same respect to Martha Stewart?