Extreme Makeover: Dying Old Media Edition
Iconic titles — from Sports Illustrated to FORTUNE to Salon — are worth saving. All they need is a rebranding that’s so out-there, it just might work
Almost seven years ago to this day, I was a 20-year-old intern at TIME Inc. having my first small taste of life as a media consultant. While I normally brought home $9/hour, the company offered me a single-day promotion, allowing me to pocket $450 to reverse-mentor a retiring senior executive on the fundamentals of Twitter. The media maven approached the session with genuine curiosity, probing me as if I were Jack Dorsey as I walked through the basics of hashtags and distilling your stream of consciousness into 140 characters. When our hour was up, he shook my hand and said, “Well, that’s probably enough Twitter for me.”
It was microcosmic of everything I saw in my summer at TIME Inc., which embodied an old dog fighting for his place in the new world. While many of my colleagues were brilliant professionals committed to bringing TIME into the digital age, the company remained hopelessly devoted to print-advertising revenue.
Today, TIME Inc. has been sold for parts and advertising. The company is firmly on the Hemingway curve, currently disintegrating gradually while barreling…
