Legacy brands can succeed in information age: Column

For a generation now, newspapers and magazines have seen their readership and advertising base dramatically disrupted by the profusion of rapid-fire Internet alternatives and, more recently, nanosecond mobile delivery devices. With the reimagining of business templates, it is difficult to categorize what market companies are in as they find innovative ways to aggregate, curate and distribute news and information.

For example, how should Google, Yahoo and Twitter be characterized in this digital information society?

A new player with a storied print legacy emerged a week ago Monday when CEO Joe Ripp rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and reintroduced Time Inc. as a public stock no longer subsumed in corporate conglomeration. The challenge, however, for all of the former print-based companies is how to meet the competition coming in every direction as new media start-ups redefine what is news, how it is manufactured and in what context it is delivered.

One interesting clue of the future strategy for newly reconstituted legacy print companies like Time Inc. is, in fact, to examine their genetic history. Founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden in 1923, Time's stable of magazines traced the course of the "American Century" with iconic idiomatic story-telling together with emotionally impactful photo-journalism. Always on the lookout for new tools of technology to present the news graphically and through the prism of individual people, it was not much of a stretch for succeeding managements to invest in the moving image.

Roy Larsen, another partner with Luce, expanded into The March of Time, the Oscar-winning newsreel series which transported movie-goers to eyewitness pivotal events before the adoption of home television. Jim Shepley, as president of Time Inc., took the company into newspapers, but also invested heavily in video technology and cable TV, which spawned the R&D effort leading to the birth of Home Box Office. It was the then-Chairman Andrew Heiskell, a former journalist and publisher, who authorized the game-changing satellite contract with RCA that transformed HBO into a national network and ushered in the modern cable industry.

There was also a heartbeat within the "old" Time Inc. to engage in so-called transforming transactions beyond print, taking off from the growth of HBO and the company's position as the largest cable operator in the 1980's. Combinations followed in succession — Time Inc. and Warner Communications, Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting and CNN, Time Warner and AOL.

So what should journalistic print companies like Time Inc. do in the struggle for redefinition, encased in history and faced with declining print revenues? Is conglomeration and acquisitive diversification an answer or does it lead to dysfunctional "synergy" in an artificial media megalopolis? The nimble, fast-paced, non-hierarchical, anything-is-possible cultures of news start-ups pose a real, continuing threat to legacy companies and are not easy to assimilate.

In this era of citizen journalism where anyone can tweet an event or upload a potentially newsworthy video, and where innovative start-ups have a point of view with youth-appealing "edge", what value and meaning do legacy print brands have? These questions are going to be addressed as more and more established print companies are being spun off from corporate parents heeding Wall Street's push for pure-play growth.

In the end, the most important questions may still be dangling: Where are facts being checked and sources confirmed? Is there a clearer distinction between journalistic reporting and advertiser-generated content? Who, in which estate, will hold the power structure in government and society accountable with unbiased investigative revelation?

Maybe the cacophony of the Internet can be domesticated by forward-looking remade print brands.

What is needed is entrepreneurship, a passion to see the new in the old, to fail and fail until it works, and — most importantly — to want to change the world!

Jerry Levin, the retired chairman and CEO of Time Warner, is currently chairman of StartUp Health.

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