Whenever analysts say "content is king," people often visualize Mel Brooks in "History of the World Part 1" shouting "it’s good to be the king." A more accurate picture is Shakespeare’s tragic "King Lear" – at least that’s the monarch that comes to mind when I think of Time Warner.

The world’s largest media conglomerate lives in confusing times. On the one hand, it can still make tens of millions at the box office from its latest installment in the Batman franchise "The Dark Knight." At the same time, it is waging a battle against Google and Wall Street to prove it can still deliver the goods as more content heads to the Internet.

Part of the problem is the New York-based company is saddled with slow growing businesses such as the Time Inc. magazine unit. According to the New York Times, the company will shrink the business to focus on popular titles such as People and Sports Illustrated. The paper also pointed out that some analysts expect Time Warner to try and sell the business en masse. Given the slowdown in advertising spending, that might be wishful thinking.

The transformation of AOL into an advertising-based business happened about three years too late. Time Warner’s cable networks business continues to generate healthy profits despite the economic slowdown and Warner Bros. continues to benefit from its stable of franchise. Even so, it’s no longer so good to be the king and Google is the reason why.

The search engine giant is developing a new site called Knol, which the Times describes as a place where experts can share their knowledge. Sounds a lot like Wikipedia, no? More importantly, it seems to take Google into the content publishing business, something it has sworn to media companies it has no plans to do.

"Google can say they are not in the content business, but if they are paying people and distributing and archiving their work, it is getting harder to make that case," said Jason Calacanis, the chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine that relies on editors to create pages on a variety of subjects, in an interview with the paper.

Good point.

Jonathan Berr

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