M Scott Havens, senior vice president of digital at newly independent Time Inc is not a man to pussyfoot around journalistic conventions. “We have to rethink the old ‘church and state’ rules of journalism,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we violate journalistic integrity or the trust we have with our readership. But [these rules] were for a different medium and a different age.”
A profitable age, too, he might have added, and one that Time Inc, a venerable fixture of US publishing and home to titles such as Time, Sports Illustrated and People, will forever be associated with. In 2014, however, things have changed. At the start of June Time Inc was spun off from parent company Time Warner in a move that media analyst Ken Doctor described as “an orphaning of distressed publishing assets”. He was hardly alone in his pessimistic view as Time Inc embarked on its debt-laden independence.
Havens, who joined Time Inc in March from the Atlantic, which he helped to turn into a digitally dynamic, profitable company, might be excused for wondering what he has got himself into. Time Inc starts its new life around $1.3bn in debt, after purchasing UK publisher IPC Media (home to Marie Claire and NME) from Time Warner. To service this, it will reportedly need to pay around $40m to $50m a year after taxes, and budget trimming across the board is already being discussed.
Time Inc. is widely seen as lagging behind its competitors in digital, coming late, for example, to digital-only subscriptions. Havens disagrees. “That was my perspective until I came to the business,” he says, arguing instead that Time Inc hasn’t been bold enough in talking up its digital achievements. He sees it as one of the biggest digital media businesses there is for scale and audience, “one that generates hundreds of millions of dollars through digital platforms – put us up against Condé Nast, Hearst and the New York Times and we are not just amongst them, we are bigger”. Havens concedes, though, that it has missed out on launching “scalable, transformational digital products”. Such as? LinkedIn. “Fortune should have been launching a platform that connects executives and has content. But it didn’t.”
Fortune, and other Time Inc properties, he believes, saw themselves strictly as magazines and this limited their scope for innovation. They were hardly alone in this, of course, but the “magazine” tag is something he seems particularly keen to shake off. “We are not a magazine company,” he exclaims, unprompted. “We are a media company with a portfolio.”
“We want to build the next LinkedIn, the next Gilt [a US commerce site], the next Facebook,” Havens adds. “We have got really smart people and we need to let them use their brains.” Such flattery is likely to go down well with his employees but it comes with a stark warning: “If they are not up for that [challenge] then we need to bring in some new people,” Havens says.
Time Inc journalists will also have to swallow Havens’s starkly entrepreneurial views, which come from a background in startups and digital properties rather than traditional media. “I did the startup thing for four to five years and that is where my business philosophy comes from,” he says. “You don’t have the resources. You have to roll up your sleeves and get it done. Where can you build a business, create new revenue lines and where can you attack the incumbents? That is very different from [a career] starting at Condé Nast or Time.”
Even at the Atlantic, where he rapidly rose from vice president of digital strategy and operations to president, Havens says his experience was far from being part of a “massive media company”. “That was a scrappy talented group of people that acted like a startup to create a multi-platform digital brand,” he explains. Key to Havens’s entrepreneurial spirit is a firm belief in e-commerce, which he sees as one of the pivotal growth areas for Time Inc, alongside video, lifting the company above the desperate chase for online advertising. “We can optimise our brands digitally right now. We can make more money and grow our advertising on these sites. But that is simply not enough.”
But isn’t there a risk that readers of trusted magazine brands like Time and People will be put off by the mixture of editorial and commercial interests? “I don’t see it as a huge issue,” Havens replies. “Consumers aren’t stupid.” He cites People’s recent partnership with video shopping platform Joyus to create branded videos as an example of how this can work. “With People and Joyus you have got great talent talking about a product they like and selling it. That is very different from a profile of Angelina and Brad. Consumers demand that that is truthful, well thought through, that it is a real story with high-level integrity.”
Time Inc’s plans for video are equally ambitious and it has around 50 shows currently in production. Most of these will sit online, where Havens notes there is a real demand from advertisers. “There are a lot of people selling banner ad space and supply is outstripping demand,” he says. “We don’t have that problem in video.” In fact he believes that the company could probably sell advertising against 500m video streams a month, more than six times its current total of 80m monthly streams.
Havens, then, doesn’t lack for fight or ambition as he settles into his role. Whether his new colleagues, already battered by a turbulent year on the fringes at Time Warner, will share his commercial ambitions and business savvy is another matter. They can be assured, at least, that Havens values journalism, as he appeared on a panel at this year’s South by SouthWest festival under the banner “Can great journalism make for great business?”.
“I answered definitely yes,” he says. Why? Because consumers will ultimately pay for quality digital content. People, Havens argues, have always paid to access unique and differentiated content and the rise of digital stores such as iTunes and Amazon have “retrained” consumers from an assumption of “free” to “willing to pay” online. What’s more, improvements in mobile hardware and platforms, together with stored payment systems, have made paying for digital content incredibly easy.
“I see many digital examples of customers paying for digital content that give me hope – the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Dish, Netflix – even when the consumer can possibly find it, or a replacement, elsewhere,” Havens adds.
He doesn’t share the gloom of certain British magazine publishing executives, then? “You can be gloomy if you want to operate your business the same way as you have for the last 10 years,” Havens says. “If we rethink what we are, how we serve customers and markets, then I feel optimistic we can rebuild the brand.”
Curriculum vitae
Education Chatham high school, Loomis Chaffee, Hamilton College, Stern School of Business
Career 1995 broker, Guy Carpenter 1999 vice president, finance and strategy, FoodService.com 2000 vice president, business development, NursingHands.com 2002 director, technology ventures, Lighthouse International 2004 senior manager, business development, Yahoo Finance 2006 executive director, Condé Nast Digital 2009 vice president, digital strategy, Atlantic Media Company 2012 president, the Atlantic 2014 senior vice president, digital, Time Inc
