Convergence

EVER SINCE THE New York Times Co. announced in late January it would attempt to cash in on the Web investment craze by offering stock in Times Digital Media in an initial public offering, it has been the talk of the industry. The Times, according to Reuters, could raise up to $100 million from new stockholders by creating a "tracking stock" for Times Digital Media. A tracking stock is one that...

Walter Isaacson awoke early at his home in Bronxville, New York, fifteen miles north of Manhattan in Westchester County. Idly, the editor of Time flipped on an all-news radio station. That's when he learned that his seventy-seven-year-old magazine, and indeed all of Time Warner -- the world's biggest media company -- was being enfolded in the embrace of fifteen-year-old America Online, the...

Ten years to the day after Time and Warner merged and shocked corporate America, Steve Case, head of AOL, and Gerald Levin, head of Time Warner, announced a blockbuster plan to join forces. Their new corporate title--AOL Time Warner--truly reflects the ascendancy of the Internet and the beginning of a new economic era for the TV industry. Less than two weeks into the new millennium, AOL bet its...

TO SOME IT'S A convergence of shared interests, to others it opens the door to rampant conflicts of interest. But to all, I suspect, it is viewed as inevitable. The subject is alliances between news operations owned by separate and often competing entities. The driving force behind the alliances, as in so many other aspects of the media business, is the Internet. Based on recent agreements, the...