Time Inc.'s chief content officer ready to take down silos
Alan Murray has been a journalist since he was a 9-year-old kid, publishing his neighborhood newspaper.
The editor of Fortune magazine will need to muster such ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit as he takes on a new, monumental job of getting Time Inc.’s magazines and websites to work together more closely.
As the newly appointed chief content officer of Time Inc., Murray, 61, will be the boss of the editors of its more than 20 magazines at a time when the publishing giant is hemorrhaging print ad sales and cutting back on staffing. His primary job will be to better orchestrate the efforts of its online and print publications, while paying close attention to digital revenue. His boss, Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp, has told investors that Murray has been tasked “to grow audiences in every format and on every platform, with particular emphasis on mobile, social and video."
For example, in addition to Health.com, the website of Time Inc.'s Health magazine, the company has several other print and online publications that produce stories and video about health, health care, health businesses and healthy eating. Similarly haphazard distribution of its content also occurs on other topics.
It’ll be a tough slog for the veteran journalist, who spent much of his career at The Wall Street Journal in various editing roles. In the summer of 2014, he joined Fortune after serving as president of the Pew Research Center for a couple of years.
With print ad sales falling ceaselessly, Time Inc.’s stock has declined more than 30% since it was spun off from Time Warner in June 2014. In the most recent quarter, its net income fell 25%. But the pace of digital ad sales is picking up, prompting many of the changes that will be spearheaded by Murray. A year ago, Time Inc.’s digital ad sales – up 65% in the second quarter – were less than one-third of print ad sales. Now, they are nearly half, leading to a slight uptick in total ad sales for the quarter.
Murray sat with USA TODAY recently to talk about the challenges ahead. His comments have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: You’ve been on the job less than a month. What’s been keeping you busy?
I've been speed-dating the editors (of other Time Inc. magazines). It’s really an unbelievable collection of iconic brands. And frankly, if we can’t figure out a way to make a good business out of it, we ought to be all marched out of here and shot.
We have to figure out opportunities to attack digital markets in different ways where the synergies among the brands exist. For example, can we pull all our health content in one place and create a winning digital product in health? You will see over the course of the next two to three months some very big changes in the way we are organized. .
Q: What have you learned so far in meeting with the editors?
I was a little surprised to discover that these brands had all existed pretty much in silos. They didn't do a lot of sharing of best practices and didn’t have many opportunities to learn from each other. In the digital world, they didn't think a lot particularly about how they could work together.
Q: What are some new initiatives and areas of emphasis after the reorganization?
There are too many opportunities that sit right in front of us. We have to prioritize...and really think about the right way to organize this thing. Let's say we’re oversold in food (advertising). We can use our various social feeds in our various websites to point more traffic to food content. Those sorts of things just didn’t happen here before.
We’ll try a lot of different things (on video). SI.com is really awesome and has lots of short videos. You look at that as an example of what we are capable of doing at our best. We just have to do it more regularly and more frequently.
Q: How do you plan to manage conflicts for resources as magazines seek to maintain quality while digital revenue demands grow?
I don't think there's a conflict. I think they’re very different kinds of journalism. At Fortune, I have one reporter who last year wrote three (longform) stories. My digital reporters are writing three times every day.
The question is how you organize yourself so you could do the deeply reported 6,000-, 7,000-word stories, and fast information that people want. It's a challenge, but it's a challenge that we’re already starting to meet.
Q: How will your journalistic sensibilities affect Time Inc.’s other publications?
I've been a journalist since I was 9-years-old, literally. I care about good journalism. If you look at what I spent the last 10 years of my career doing, it is really about culture change – recognizing the big shift. What I really devoted myself at (previous jobs) is how you get people reoriented to take on the new challenges and opportunities. And that'll be a big part of what I will continue to do.
Q: How do you resist the temptation to manage individual magazines?
It’s not my nature. There’s 24 of them. How could I? I’ve made a challenge to all the editors to change the way we think about what we do, and I've been really impressed with how quickly they’ve picked up the challenge. Our goal is to convince ourselves, the world and the marketplace that it really does make sense for these 24 brands to be in the same company. Because if we don't prove it, then someone may come in and say. "Let's just break them up and sell them off."
Q: There’s a lot of talk about brands from traditional publishers. Is the concept still viable in the anyone-can-publish era?
I believe in the power of brands. If you think of this as a contest between people like us vs. the digital natives like BuzzFeed or Business Insider, who has the harder task? Is it harder for us to learn to become digitally savvy or is it harder for the digital natives to develop great brands? I think their task is harder. But we’ve got to be digitally savvy and savvy about how we approach this marketplace. And we can’t do it organized like magazines.
Q: Some of your publications, including Time, have moved quickly to embrace listicles and other types of digital-first stories meant to go viral? Your thoughts on how they affect your brands?
I don’t have any problems with them. There are traditional journalists who say, "Oh listicles. You’re just chasing audience." If people share with all their friends, that's a signal of some sort. Why would we not want to provide information to people in a form they like?
The term clickbait gets thrown around a lot. There is a certain type of journalism that involves writing an exaggerated headline that convinces you to click and it doesn't deliver on the promise. We should never do that. That’s fooling the readers. That will undermine your brand in the long term.
I spent years sitting in meetings with editors who would say things like ‘our readers don't like that’ or ‘readers want more of this.’ And the truth is they didn't have a clue. Now, we know what the readers want and shame on us if we don't figure out how to give them something in a form that they like.
People still want original journalism. There's no value in us just mimicking everybody else telling the same Taylor Swift story that's already been written 20 times.
Q: With all the cutbacks, some critics say the quality of your magazines, such as Time, has declined. Your response?
I don't buy the notion that the quality has declined. I certainly accept the notion that the economics have led to a decrease in book sizes in some cases. Even in an area like celebrity, people come to People magazine because they know it's not unreliable gossip. And there's been this explosion in video. We produce something like 1,000 pieces of content every day.
About Alan Murray
Title: Chief content officer of Time Inc. Editor of Fortune magazine
Previous jobs: Pew Research Center (president); The Wall Street Journal (executive editor, online; Washington bureau chief); CNBC (Washington bureau chief)
Bookswritten:The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management, Revolt in the Boardroom, The Wealth of Choices and Showdown at Gucci Gulch (co-authored with Jeffrey Birnbaum)
Education: Bachelor’s in English Literature from the University of North Carolina and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics.
Twitter: @alansmurray