Wake me when I'm vested

So, do I have this right? Time Warner's old-growth deadwood mixed with AOL's deadwood.com yields -- a shiny new three-wood?

By Sean Elder

Jan 14, 2000 | In the press reports that followed the announcement of AOL and Time Warner's wedding, a few folks (including me) made much of the sartorial relevance of TW's Gerald Levin being tieless at the press conference while AOL's Steve Case was decked out in a pretty nice suit. Levin even made a joke about the "suits from Virginia" -- since Case and Co. were supposed to be the upstarts in Dockers, and TW the honchos in pinstripes, it made for an easy lead: The tables had been turned.

Meanwhile, anyone who has ever spent time at AOL's headquarters just outside Dulles Airport in Virginia knows that a lot of the men there still dress like Steve from "Blue's Clues," and that late in the day the Nerf balls still fly (though the beer busts are mostly a thing of the past). Casual attire can be seen at Time publications on days other than Friday -- though casual there still generally means polo shirts tucked in and "be sure to iron those jeans, mister."

But AOL never exactly swung, mind you; they weren't some bohemian Silicon Alley start-up with counterintuitive design and guess-what-I'm-talking about content. For years, in fact, Case was derided as a square, the man least likely to succeed on the bleeding edge of the World Wide Web. The execs there were into golf, for chrissakes, as noted by Michael Wolff in his amusing chapter on AOL in "Burn Rate": "... this game of the 1950s corporation was the official pastime, even obsession, of this self-styled first corporation of the twenty-first century."

Time, in magazine terms, was emblematic of that '50s corporation Wolff invokes. If the man in the gray flannel suit had worked in magazines, it would have been one of Time's. The "Velvet Coffin" was so called not just because the company's perks and bennies were on a par with or better than anyone else's but because some editors and executives actually never left. On the 34th floor of the company's headquarters on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan (right across the street from that other monument to unchanging entertainment, Radio City Music Hall) were Time's famous "Aloha Suites," executive offices for men (always men) whose usefulness was played out before their contracts had expired. You could glance in, see a secretary, a sofa, maybe even a little putting green in the corner with artificial turf -- but no executive.

"All of that started changing more than 10 years ago," according to one Time Inc. veteran I spoke to, "even before the Warner merger in 1990. There were more Jews in the building, for one. And years ago the very fact that you were a senior editor automatically meant you had a liquor budget; you had a cabinet in your office that was refilled once a month with liquor."

The influx of women (not to mention sobriety) changed that culture over the years. "It's part of what happened in society, too," the writer continued. "There were no longer quite as many folks who felt the need for three-martini lunches; more editors wanted to go home and see their kids."

More important, the tolerance for deadwood and coasters decreased as well. Though there may still be a few execs with ersatz jobs on floor 34, most everyone else is hustling to compete -- and stay afloat. "In the old days the managing editor would change, but everyone would keep their jobs," said this longtimer, "while at any other magazine you would assume new editor, new photo editor and so on. That now happens at Time Inc., too." The free ride is becoming a thing of the past. A couple of years ago an edict came down from on high: "No more passing the trash." Translation? "You couldn't take the editor or writer you thought was pretty lousy and shunt them off to another magazine."

Next Page: Aloha to all that

• View blog reactions