Time Inc. goes a-hunting for a few hungry rats
TIME
Inc. is looking for a few good rats. No, not the creepy crawler type but the employee turning in fellow employee type.
Insiders at the giant publisher were surprised in recent days to see posters in their offices exhorting staffers to turn in colleagues they suspected of fraud, bribery or harassment.
At least one of the posters featured words in a handwriting font that asked employees to be on the lookout for colleagues padding their expense reports.
“John took his wife to dinner and charged it to the company as a client meal,” the eye-catching poster proclaims. Then right below it reads: “Fraud. Bribery. Harassment.”
“Our integrity starts with you. One quick anonymous phone call keeps Time Inc. the workplace you deserve.”
Then in bold type worthy of a Sports Illustrated World Series Special Edition: CALL THE ETHICS HOTLINE TODAY AT: 1-855-2944583.
“With all the problems the company has today, this is what they are spending time on?” one Time veteran told Media Ink. “They must have had meetings about this and printed up posters.”
The insider said the posters are hung, ironically, in areas where lower-level staff members frequently gather.
“They are not the people who are guilty of this kind of offense,” he chirped.
Time Inc. was once a rollicking place where padding expense reports was kind of a sport for entitled publishers, editors and star writers.
There still circulates the tale, never proven, of a top editor who hid his wife’s $10,000 mink coat in an expense report — disguised as drinks and dinners with clients.
And one SI golf writer in the days of yore would write off a new set of golf clubs that he’d donate to a caddy rather than lug his own set back home after covering a golf tournament in Britain.
But, the veteran said, “clearly they are looking for every nickel and dime these days.”
Media Ink called the hotline and was told via a recorded announcement that the service was outsourced to a third party firm, Navex Global, which promises it will protect your identify if you want to squeal on colleagues.
When we finally reached a person and asked if she had gotten a lot of calls, she responded, “I can’t give you that information, sir.”
Time Inc. rotates “different messaging on screens throughout the company, reminding employees about ethics, integrity and compliance, the same as every public company does,” a spokeswoman said. Gilbert ‘Robb’d’
Dan Gilbert, owner of the NBA champion Cleveland Cavaliers, has found it is easier to win a title than to turn the Robb Report — the 40-yearold high-end luxury magazine — into a digital powerhouse.
As 2016 wound down, Gilbert’s Rockbridge Growth Equity quietly announced it was flipping the Robb Report, purchased from Bill Curtis in 2014, into a new joint venture with
Jay Penske’s Penske Media Corp.
PMC is the owner of Women’s Wear Daily, Variety, HollywoodLife and Deadline.
“Penske’s shown some ability in b2b publishing, but we don’t know what he can do in b2c [business-toconsumer] publishing,” said one industry observer of the surprising New Year’s Eve deal.
When Rockbridge — which counts Gilbert as its managing partner — bought the Robb Report, it laid out aggressive plans to greatly expand its digital footprint. But Web traffic was erratic. Curtis, who originally stayed on as a minority partner and vice chairman, quietly exited last spring.
By last November, comScore reported the Robb Report had 715,000 unique visitors. Unfortunately, traffic was so low last January, February and April that it fell below the minimum threshold of 200,000 uniques that comScore requires to track a site.
In the release announcing the deal, Rockbridge and Penske pointed to a “deep focus on digital and live media and emerging social platforms.”
It could not be learned how much of a stake Rockbridge will retain going forward. WWD reported on Tuesday that Robb Report’s offices in New York and LA would move into office space with PMC. The last of Spin CPXi, a digital ad company headed by Michael Seiman, said it is buying the last of SpinMedia’s sites, including Celebuzz, The Frisky and The Superficial from MC Partners. Though the acquiring company appears to derive most of its money from ad marketing, it does have a fledgling media division that includes three sites: PressRoomVIP, HipHopMyWay and Warped Speed. CPXi made the Forbes list of most promising American companies in 2014, the same year it tapped into $30 million in outside funding and purchased AdReady, which bids on ads in real time for clients. On the sell side, MC Partners has been rapidly divesting its few remaining SpinMedia sites at fire sale prices. It sold Vibe and Spin, its two most known brands that started as magazines and were converted to digitalonly formats, to Billboard owner Prometheus Global Media on Dec. 22.