As early as 1922, the "father of the times" Henry Luce and alumnus Brighton Harden co-founded the "Time" magazine, in the general "serious and orthodox" language style of newspapers and magazines, "Time" with its depth and timeliness of the weekly form, soon became one of the most widely sold and influential periodicals.

After Harden's death in 1929, Luce gradually built several magazine brands, such as Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated, which formed Time Publishing and became the world's largest publisher in the mid-1960s.

In January 1990, the representative of the most glorious era of the Chinese publishing industry merged with Warner Communications, and "Time Warner" was born, which was one of the largest media and entertainment groups in the world at that time.

At that time, Time Warner could be called the product of the integration of the media group of the United States. With the acquisition of Turner Broadcasting in 1996, Time Warner completed one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the 20th century.

In January 2000, the online star company Mi Guo Online announced the acquisition of Time Warner for $181 billion and established AOL Time Warner. Magazines, TV, Internet...... All forms of media are integrated into the world's largest media companies.

In 2001, the new company quickly jumped from 271st to 37th place in the Fortune 500 rankings.

But it was also the worst M&A deal in history, as the stock market crash of 2000 quickly burst the dot-com bubble that year, and AOL's online advertising business plummeted, and the dial-up business was eaten up by broadband companies.

In the first year of the merger, the company lost $4.9 billion, and in the second year, it set a record loss of $98.7 billion, equivalent to the GDP of Chile and Vietnam combined, and within two years of the merger, the company's market value shrank by $200 billion, becoming one of the biggest tragedies in modern financial history.

Eventually, this huge media convergence ended with a separation. In 2008, Time Warner spun off the AOL business, and then spun off the Time Warner cable business, but the downward trend did not stop.

In the midst of the decline of the magazine industry in the United States, Time Warner's magazine business is facing a challenge, and its magazine business has been declining in revenue for 22 quarters.

Time Warner's internal demand to spin off this business, so as not to drag down the whole has been very loud, otherwise with Mark's ability, it will not be able to easily convince this group of elites, which is equivalent to a prostitute meeting a prostitute, which can easily become a good thing.

Richard, the chairman and CEO of Time Warner, has also always hoped that Time Warner will focus entirely on the TV and film business, while Time will focus on its core printing business.

The abandoned Times Company was once invincible, but when it was divested, it was heavily indebted, amortizing Time Warner's $1.3 billion debt. This figure is more than three times the annual profit of the times. As a result, the rating agency Moody's gave Times a negative rating.

"A company that has been almost drained," Time Inc.'s Fortune magazine described within a week of the breakup, "though not heavily indebted, but Time is not as agile as a rival like News Corp., which had no debt and $2 billion in cash at the time of the split last year." ”

Like most newspaper publishers, after experiencing a slump in advertising and subscriptions, Time has begun to cut expenses, close its divisions, and let talented but demanding high-paid journalists go.

Magazines began to share resources, and editors worked with the commercial department. Last year, Times replaced the editors of its magazines, Real Simple and Instyle, and laid off about 100 employees across the company.

More symbolically, Time recently moved from the Times Living building at Rockefeller Center to a featureless skyscraper in Lower Manhattan.

"It's not what it used to be," says the editor who worked for Time, "and unfortunately they have the same name, it's just that the two don't have much to do with each other." ”

Robert, the current CEO of Time, was tasked with revitalizing the company in September last year, and he quickly turned Time, People and Sports magazines into a "multimedia" and "multi-functional" company: while the print business still accounts for two-thirds of the company's $3 billion in annual revenue, Time has long since been distracted from other businesses. In the strategy of heavy audio-visual entertainment, the magazine business has been treated more lightly. The company's positioning began to loosen, and it began to offer paid services to its readers, such as opening a food and wine club or selling pet insurance.

However, no matter how confident Robert is, he may not be able to save the declining magazine empire. For decades, this magazine empire, which has opened up countless social topics in the United States and even the world, is struggling at the moment.

Analysts and former employees alike agree that unprecedented challenges and missed opportunities have made it more difficult for the company to adapt to the changing media landscape.

Although it still makes some noise from time to time, the cover story of Time occasionally attracts some attention.

Many people have high hopes for the strong entry of the Mark Wang family, but Mark is not interested in running magazines, he thinks that the cost of doing this business is too high, the profit is too low, and the labor cost is high and rising, which makes everyone less interested in running this business.

Once, even political strongmen were proud to be on the cover of Time Magazine, and every year's top ten people in the United States and the top ten people in the world were the most eye-catching, but their advertising revenue was decreasing year by year, just like "Vanity Fair", the income was decreasing year by year, and finally they couldn't even afford Vanity Fair's Oscar night.

For several national magazines of the Times Group, Mark still has some importance and hopes to continue to hold them, but they have joined the ranks of strikes without hesitation, aircraft carriers without escort fleets cannot be called aircraft carrier battle groups, and today these subsidiaries are laid off, even the printing houses have been laid off, they will become rootless trees, and they will eventually disappear.

"The entire Time Warner paper sector has joined the strike, which will cause investors to worry and the stock market to be volatile," the Wall Street newspaper Peng Brown reported. ”

The major domestic news media reported on the incident, and Mark's actions were always unexpected, cutting the entire start-up publishing business into a one-size-fits-all business that only he could do, and Mark's approach also made the country's sluggish publishing industry even more difficult.

In addition to being a well-known director, an investment genius, and a well-known best-selling author, Mark's first pot of gold is the copyright fee of "Twilight", and he has also become a world-renowned best-selling author with "Twilight", and he is not optimistic about the future of the publishing industry.

In the United States, the sales of e-books on Amazon have exceeded the sales of physical books, and cooperation with e-commerce giants has become an option that traditional publishers have to accept.

The price war of e-books makes readers psychologically believe that e-books should be sold at low prices. Regardless of the market demand, publishers must accept market pressure to keep cutting prices. For example, the hardcover print version of Mark's "Twilight 3: Breaking Dawn" is priced at £14.99, and the e-book price of the book is £13.99 in Pingguo, but the price in Amazon is only £3.59, which eventually forced Pingguo to lower the price to £4.99 per copy.

The enthusiasm for reading in the United States society has long since disappeared: "Half of the book review pages of the newspapers in the United States, represented by the Sunday book review page of the Los Angeles Times, have ceased publication due to the lack of advertising, and the rest of the book review pages of the New York Times no longer have the authority they used to have; only the National Public Radio station is interested in books in radio programs, and only Oprah is the only book-related program on television, but she and her readers only respond to life topics; various book-related awards, whether it is the National Book Award of the United States, The United States Book Critics Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize, all added together, cannot catch up with Oprah's market appeal. ”

The traditional Omi publishing industry has always been an 'industry of ideas', respecting intellectual value, aesthetic value and social value, and the leading nature of concept is its soul. Publishers at the time believed that ideas ahead of the curve would only be accepted by a few people at first, so it was natural that good books would not make a profit. Over time, some ideas gain widespread acceptance, and there are bound to be bestsellers in publications, whose high profits can cover losses.

In other words, the publisher's job is to discover new authors, to canonize them, to continue to discover new authors. In this way, publishing is an extraordinary professional satisfaction to be able to generate and preserve cultural creativity and spiritual values for humanity as a whole as a self-sufficient business.

It is not difficult to explain why, for two or three hundred years before the eighties, the annual profit margin of the Omi publishing industry was only 3%-4%, which was even lower than the interest on bank deposits, and the publishers were still able to enjoy it, and of course, it is not difficult to explain why publishing is called "a gentleman's business", because it was not intended to make money. ”

Perhaps, even such a perseverance that is not for making money and enjoying oneself may be difficult to sustain under the impact of transnational capital and technological revolution. But one thing is certain: a good publishing environment needs to be created by readers, practitioners, and law enforcers.

No matter how complex and chaotic the environment is, there are always some values to be championed and something to be done. Some people say that traditional publishing is a sunset industry, some people say that it has no way out, but there is no one like Mark who ruthlessly excises the publishing business like a surgery, Time Magazine: "Mark has no right to sentence the publishing industry to death." ”