In the decade I’ve covered John Huey, I’d never once been to his magisterial office on the 34th floor of the Time & Life building. It is large and imposing in a way its occupant is not, an unlikely landing spot for an old newspaper hack. On the wall is a photograph of William Faulkner, “the patron saint of all hard-drinking Southern writers,” as Mr. Huey, a native of Atlanta, describes him.
At the end of the year, Mr. Huey will vacate the office and leave his position as Time Inc.’s editor in chief. Martha Nelson, the editorial director of the company, will move in and become the first woman to hold the job.
Mr. Huey says he won’t miss the perch and I believe him, partly because the job now has brutal aspects. Besides, he is a reporter by nature, and seemed happy to be at-large whenever I saw him at events.
Mr. Huey, who had his start as a reporter at The Atlanta Constitution before heading to The Wall Street Journal and then Time Inc., is only the sixth editor in chief in the company’s history, a job that the writer Kurt Andersen once described as having “papal luster.” These days? Not so much.
“There’s been a fair amount of unpleasantness at that table,” Mr. Huey said, pointing to a big one in the corner. Rather than using it to plan magazine start-ups or acquisitions, he found himself going over lists of staff cuts necessitated by print’s collapse.
In his seven years as the top editor, the core magazines — like Time, Fortune, People and Money — have lost almost a third of their employees, and the future is no brighter. Overall revenue at Time Inc. fell 6 percent last quarter, to $838 million, although operating income increased 2 percent, thanks to the constant cost-cutting.
“Google sort of sucked all of the honey out of our business,” he said with a shrug, not complaining, just saying.
“When it was good, it was really good, but there were a lot of rough patches,” he said. “But I never wondered why I got into journalism during any of it. I still believe in the kind of storytelling we do here.”
But that confidence had limits. In the 11 years Mr. Huey helped run the editorial side of Time Inc. — first as editorial director, then as editor in chief — he commuted to his home and family in Charleston, S.C., on weekends, partly because he always felt he was on the cusp of being fired.
“There have been bullets flying since I got here, way back when I first came as a writer at Fortune,” he said, referring to his first job at the company, in 1988. “I came to work when it was just Time Inc., then it became part of Time Warner, and then it was Time Warner with Turner, and then it became AOL Time Warner and then just Time Warner again. I always figured my time might be up. Came close, but it never happened.”
As the editor of Fortune, Mr. Huey was a consummate magazine maker, turning out a product that was modern, knowing and highly decorated. A former naval intelligence officer, he displayed a remarkable understanding of how power operates in corporate America, which served him well as he navigated his way to the top of Time Inc.
“Media can be a very dangerous and political business — I am not an innocent in such matters, by the way — but I always had enough information to stay away from the more obvious hazards,” he said. “And we did O.K. We avoided major conflagrations, there were no $1 billion lawsuits, and no compromise in the journalism we were doing at our magazines.”
He had excellent relationships with Richard Parsons and Jeffrey Bewkes, the former and current chief executives of Time Warner, which came in handy, given that the leadership at Time Inc. became somewhat chaotic after the departure of Don Logan, the former chief executive of Time Inc. and a mentor of Mr. Huey.
Ann S. Moore, the chief executive when Mr. Huey became editor in chief in 2006, eliminated potential rivals and a lot of talent in the process. Jack Griffin replaced Ms. Moore in 2010 and quickly began remaking Time Inc. He grew tired of Mr. Huey’s resistance and took aim at him, according to executives at Time Warner, and was out after five months.
It fell to Mr. Huey, along with the company’s chief financial officer and its general counsel, to run the company until earlier this year, when Laura Lang, a newcomer to publishing, was selected as chief executive.
“It’s odd that a former newspaper guy ended up helping run the place, but it turned into a job for a ‘mudder,’ and I can run in the mud if I have to,” he said.
Approaching 65, he decided it was time to move on. He will not leave to a herald of trumpets, but he has had his wins: by some measure, Time and Money are the last players standing in their categories.
Mr. Huey installed a bureau in Detroit when the rest of the country was trying to forget about it, and he scrambled the jets so Time Inc. magazines had a presence in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
He also brokered a deal with Turner Broadcasting to set up CNN/Money, which used the editorial content and staff of Money and Fortune to create a highly profitable Web site that makes more money than both those magazines. He was, in the main, an anchor for a company that often needed one.
“John is a very funny, self-deprecating guy, and none of that gets in the way of him being a very serious person,” said Daniel Okrent, who worked with Mr. Huey for many years. “He preserved the editorial independence of the magazines at a time when it was hard to resist the constant economic pressure to do stories that would help advertising.”
Now Mr. Huey is packing his stuff to prepare for a fellowship at Harvard. “I’m looking forward to getting back closer to the keyboard than I have been,” he said. Before he goes, he will probably slip Merle Haggard’s “Big City” into the CD player, an album whose title track frequently kept him company in his corner office.
I’m tired of this dirty old city.
Entirely too much work and never enough play.
And I’m tired of these dirty old sidewalks.
Think I’ll walk off my steady job today.
Gesturing at the magazines on the table, Mr. Huey said: “We still make a great deal of money because consumers pay us money for the products that we give them.”
“But I can’t look anybody in the eye who is coming into the business and tell them that they are going to end up in an office like this,” he added, with a wave at its expanse. “But who is to say that anybody should live like this anyway?”
The Media Equation: John Huey, Editor in Chief of Time Inc., Prepares to Leave
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The Media Equation: John Huey, Editor in Chief of Time Inc., Prepares to Leave
