• Business Week, Tuesday, March 21, 2006 11:15 AM

Business Week Editor In Chief Stephen J. Adler recently had an opportunity to sit down with Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons to discuss a broad range of topics. Among them, of course, was the inability of the New York-based media congomerate to boost its long-lagging stock price. An excerpt: "Adler: Why is the market not happy with Time Warner? Parsons: It's less specific to Time Warner than it is to our sector. Markets cannot deal with uncertainty, and there is a lot of uncertainty around the future prospects for the Old Media businesses. How are they going to fare and grow in this new digital age? Will piracy hollow out the margins in the content business? The market is saying: 'Right now we don't know, so we're staying away.' Adler: Time Warner has a huge investment in magazines. Is that business in trouble? Parsons: No. It's a very good business. I'm going to quote my friend Warren Buffett. Shortly after I became CEO, everybody had a suggestion on how to fix the company. One was to sell the magazine business. Warren said: 'If I were you, I wouldn't sell [it]. But if you do, sell it to me.' He said people are going to be reading magazines for a long, long time."

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