“I’ve gone from a pimply kid to the cover of Time magazine? Holy shit!” That was Dwayne Johnson, who was among the hordes of celebrities, politicians, power brokers, and influencers of all stripes who descended on Jazz at Lincoln Center Tuesday night for the annual Time 100 Gala. It was the magazine’s first Time 100 bash under the ownership of Silicon Valley royalty Marc and Lynne Benioff, who bought the iconic publication from Meredith Corporation last year. The Time 100 event has always been a lavish and star-studded affair, but this year there were added flourishes befitting the Benioff era. “It definitely feels richer,” one regular attendee remarked of the party during cocktail hour.
For one thing, Time teed up the evening’s festivities with an all-day newsmaker summit featuring an impressive array of past and present Time 100 honorees. The dinner tables this year were outfitted with tablet devices pre-loaded with Time 100 content. The swag totes were stuffed with Amazon Echoes for all. Breaking the tradition of the usual post-soirée staff karaoke session, there was an after-party in the lobby D.J.-ed by Questlove. On top of that, the dinner itself—with performances from Khalid and Taylor Swift—made news thanks to the presence of Jared Kushner, who was sitting next to former Time editor in chief Nancy Gibbs, only a stone’s throw from Nancy Pelosi’s table. When comedian Hasan Minhaj gave a toast, he skewered Kushner’s pal Mohammed bin Salman before flaming the Trump son-in-law and White House adviser to his face. “I know there’s a lot of very powerful people here,” Minhaj said. “It would be crazy if . . . there was a high-ranking official in the White House that could WhatsApp M.B.S. and say, ‘Hey, maybe you could help that person get out of prison because they don’t deserve it.’”
Only a year ago, the future of Time and its sister titles Fortune and Sports Illustrated was looking uncertain, if not precarious. Meredith had just acquired Time Inc., and the company swiftly put Time Inc.’s crown jewels on the market since they didn’t quite fit with the more lifestyle-oriented Meredith portfolio. Time was the first of the bunch to be sold, and with a price tag of $190 million, it sent a loud-and-clear message that legacy print media wasn’t such a worthless dinosaur after all. Time now had a pair of philanthropically minded billionaire owners who were promising investment and editorial independence. The worker bees all got new laptops and $1,000 cash bonuses. The place has been hiring up a storm, and the staff is now getting ready for a move back to Midtown from Meredith’s Lower Manhattan headquarters. Judging by the conversations I had with Time employees at the gala on Tuesday night, the honeymoon phase is very much still operative, and they’re optimistic that the Benioffs will be upstanding owners in the long run.
Elsewhere in the Time Inc. diaspora are a range of outcomes and uncertainties. After Fortune’s sale to the Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon for $150 million back in November, the mood at the magazine is upbeat. The Fortune crew is soon moving to new headquarters at South Street Seaport, where they were treated to a low-key but much-appreciated welcoming party a couple of months ago. (Beer, wine, pizza.) Now they’re just waiting to be fully untangled from Meredith’s corporate infrastructure. “They’re neck-deep in back-end plumbing stuff, migrating the content over, remaking the Web site,” one staffer told me. (Money, a companion title to Fortune that was originally being shopped in a package deal, has been taken off the market and will cease publishing in print, Meredith announced last week.)
With Time and Fortune apparently in good hands, that just leaves Sports Illustrated, which is said to be the most challenged of the brands from a business perspective. It’s also the title whose sale has dragged on far longer than any had anticipated, with still no end in sight. Understandably, the vibe there isn’t exactly sanguine. “Meredith told the street they were gonna have a deal done by June,” one person with knowledge of the sale process told me a couple weeks ago. “It’s the middle of April, and there are still multiple people in conversations.” According to another person close to the sale, there are “at least three” suitors presently in the mix, one of which is believed to be a group led by former basketball star Junior Bridgeman. (A Meredith spokesman said, “I can’t comment on any particular potential buyer other than to say we have several interested parties.”) According to my sources who are plugged into the deal-talk, Meredith wants between $120 million and $150 million for Sports Illustrated and the accompanying sports Web site FanSided, which Time Inc. bought in 2015.
Asked for an update on the E.T.A., the Meredith spokesman said, “We hope to have an agreement in place by the end of the fiscal year, but don’t have a specific timetable.” That said, the clock is ticking. “I think they’re at a place where if it doesn’t move soon for whatever set of reasons, it’ll actually start to diminish in value,” one of my sources with knowledge of the sale process said. “They need to get something done sooner rather than later.”
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