Time magazine, it's been nice knowing you. If Lloyd Grove's item in today's New York Daily News is correct, the venerable publication may be headed straight into the ground:
The good folks at Time magazine are buzzing that a successor to managing editor Jim Kelly will be named late this week or early next week.
Word is that Time Inc. editor in chief John Huey, who's been putting his stamp on the publishing giant since taking over from Norman Pearlstine in January, is looking seriously at "outsiders" who've spent their careers away from the Time Inc. corporate cocoon.
"The choice is supposed to be 'surprising'," one Time insider told me.
New York magazine is claiming today that Tina Brown is prominent on Huey's list of candidates to replace Kelly, who'll exchange his office on the 24th floor of Time's midtown headquarters for the executive suite on 34.
The 52-year-old Brown — who has been the top editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and the late, lamented Talk — is at work on a book about Princess Diana, and didn't return phone calls.
Oh, Lordy. That "not returning phone calls" thing is always a sure confirmation of confirmation itself. So let's say for the sake of argument that John Huey has indeed gone out of his gourd and chosen four-time loser (CNBC, Vanity Fair, Talk, The New Yorker) Brown to build Time magazine a pine box from scratch (since she has so much experience with scratching, after all.) Then, well, yes. The choice of CNBC's biggest disaster--and that's including John McEnroe and Michael Eisner--to run Time would indeed be the "surprising" choice he's looking for. Tina Brown is an outstanding choice to replace Jim Kelly at Time if the criteria is someone who's a proven cultural, critical, and commercial failure. But sometimes, you just have to laugh--how much do you want to bet that if she gets the Time job, her first move will be to appear on spiritual tv heir Michael Eisner's bomb of a CNBC talk show, "Conversations," to compare their mutual imaginary successes?
