The Fanciest Dive: What Happened When the Giant Media Empire of Time/Life Leaped Without Looking into the Age of High-Tech - Hardcover

Byron, Christopher M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393022617 ISBN 13: 9780393022612

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1986

Synopsis

The true look-before-you-leap story of the pitfalls, pratfalls and damage that resulted when Time/Life Corp. plunged into a venture designed to tap into the potential profts of cable TV

About this title

Reviews

Early in 1983, Time, Inc. launched a new magazine, TV-Cable Week, which promised to provide state-of-the-art programming information to cable owners across the country. Six months later the magazine folded, at a staggering $47 million loss. The author, who had been a senior editor on TV-Cable Week's staff, spent the following two years interviewing key players in the venture, and has produced this account of its rise and fall. The original concept, Byron reports, grew out of Time's felt need for control in the cable industry and credibility on Wall Street. When TV-Cable Week failed to attract distributors, and its losses surpassed projections, Time's corporate leaders abandoned the project they had not market tested. Byron tells an engrossing and plausible behind-the-scenes tale of heroes, villains, secret agendas and suppressed memos, and concludes that when corporate decision makers become preoccupied with profits in disregard of their customers, the result is disaster. This book is to be read in the context of the current shifts and survival questions faced by Time, Inc. and other corporate giants today. First serial to Vanity Fair.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Over the years Time, Inc. has had unrivaled success developing new magazines. Thus the communications industry was shocked when, in 1983, the company launched a short-lived dud called TV-Cable Week , which proved to be "the quickest and costliest failure in magazine publishing history." What happened? How could a conglomerate with Time's resources and track record bomb so miserably? Byron, an editor with the ill-fated publication, furnishes the answers in this inside account of corporate bumbling and confusion. As readable as it is enightening, the book names names and affixes blame forthrightly. An outstanding case history of a major business failure. Kenneth F. Kister, Pinellas Park P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393022617
• ISBN 13: 9780393022612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280