Time Warner

NEW YORK -- Richard Parsons, who began his career as a protege of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and went on to triumphs in the worlds of law and banking, was named president of Time Warner Inc. yesterday.Mr. Parsons will leave his current position as chairman of Dime Savings Bank, which is in the process of merging with Anchor Bank.The Brooklyn-born Mr. Parsons now becomes a potential contender for the top spot at the world's largest media and entertainment company.He also becomes the most highly placed African-American in corporate America.

Hunt Valley-based Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. said Wednesday it has settled a contract dispute with Time Warner Cable Inc., reaching a multiyear agreement that allows the cable provider to carry signals for 28 Sinclair television stations. That means Time Warner customers in 17 markets from Portland, Maine, to Pensacola, Fla., will have access to network TV stations such as Fox, NBC, CBS and ABC affiliates that might otherwise have gone dark. Time Warner, the second-largest cable operator in the United States, serves customers in 28 states, mainly in New York, the Carolinas, Ohio, Texas and Southern California.

So far, the sound is silence from Time Warner officials, as they figure out what to do about Don King's Nov. 4 gambit, taking Mike Tyson's fight with Buster Mathis Jr. to Fox, rather than pay-per-view.All that emerged from TW headquarters yesterday was a terse, one-sentence statement from Seth Greenberg, chairman and CEO of the corporation's sports division, saying that the company "would respond at the appropriate time."King and Greenberg have tussled for weeks about the Nov. 4 date, which Time Warner, through its TVKO pay-per-view wing, has planned for a Riddick Bowe-Evander Holyfield heavyweight bout.

Fewer than 50 workers are expected to be laid off this week from Advertising.com, a major Baltimore-based subsidiary of AOL Inc., as part of a change in strategy for the Internet giant, according to company officials. AOL spun off from Time Warner Inc. last month and is trying to transform itself primarily into a producer of online advertising and editorial content. AOL bought Time Warner, based in New York City, in 2001 in an acquisition that is now widely regarded as one of the worst business deals in history.

Time Warner Inc. will build the Baltimore area's biggest privately funded commercial development in five years, a 392,000-square-foot warehouse in White Marsh that will generate 400 jobs initially.The deal, pending for weeks, was unveiled by Nottingham Properties Inc. of Towson yesterday.A Nottingham affiliate sold Time Warner the land for the warehouse, which will supply Warner Bros. Worldwide retail stores in the eastern half of the United States. The value of the land was not disclosed, but the head of the construction company expected to build the project said the building will cost about $16 million.

NEW YORK -- Tele-Communications Inc. Chief Executive John C. Malone has held discussions with Time Warner Inc. executives about joining an international cable music program to compete with Viacom Inc.'s MTV channel, executives close to the discussions said yesterday.The discussions could threaten an agreement in principle that TCI reached in September with Germany's Bertelsmann A. G. to launch their own channel competitive with MTV.Time Warner's Warner Music Group, Sony Corp.'s Sony Music, Thorn EMI PLC's EMI Music unit and PolyGram, majority-owned by Philips Electronics, revealed in January that they were setting up their own international music channel.

In the entertainment industry these days, nobody wants to be small -- and nobody wants to depend on anybody else for anything.Yesterday, Time Warner Inc. confirmed that it was negotiating to buy Turner Broadcasting System in a deal valued at $8.5 billion. This comes just 30 days after the Walt Disney Co. announced it planned to acquire ABC for $19 billion and just 29 days after Westinghouse's Group W weighed in with a $5.4 billion offer for CBS.Each of these recent media mega-mergers has its own internal logic, but through them runs a common theme.

After months of acting nonchalant about the growing stake being acquired by Seagram Co., the board of Time Warner Inc. adopted defensive measures yesterday intended to prevent Seagram from buying more than 15 percent of Time Warner's stock.Seagram, a Montreal-based spirits company, has been building a stake since May in Time Warner, a New York-based media and entertainment company.On Wednesday, Seagram said it had increased its holdings to 11.7 percent from 10.4 percent. Seagram has said that it intends to buy as much as 15 percent of the company as an investment.

NEW YORK -- Turner Broadcasting System Inc. and Time Warner Inc.'s boards are expected to meet early next week to seal Time Warner's planned $8 billion acquisition of Turner, according to two executives involved in the negotiations.Turner, Time Warner and Tele-Communications Inc. -- which controls 21 percent of Turner stock and has de facto veto power over the buyout -- are slated to continue talks this weekend, the executives said.The boards are likely to convene in New York Tuesday or Wednesday to agree on the terms of forming the world's largest media and entertainment company, the executives said.

NEW YORK -- Time Warner Inc. -- moving to lighten its enormous debt load and improve its access to overseas markets -- agreed yesterday to sell a 12.5 percent stake in its historic Warner Bros. studio and its cable television operations, including HBO, to two Japanese companies for $1 billion.The agreement with electronics-maker Toshiba Corp. and trading giant C. Itoh & Co. Ltd. is a big step toward fulfilling Time Warner Chairman Steven J. Ross' vision of a global, vertically integrated, entertainment industry powerhouse, analysts said.

Workers at Advertising.com in Baltimore will be eligible to participate in a voluntary buyout program that its parent company, AOL LLC, is planning next month as part of a larger effort to cut one-third of its work force, or 2,500 positions. Advertising.com, which is AOL's online advertising network, employs about 400 people at the Tide Point office complex in South Baltimore. Time Warner Inc. is spinning off AOL, a one-time Internet giant, on Dec. 9, and the company will be accepting volunteers to leave between Dec. 4 and 11. AOL, which is based in New York City, has said that if it does not get enough volunteers, it will resort to involuntary layoffs.

Time Warner to spin off AOL, ending ill-fated deal WASHINGTON -: Media giant Time Warner announced Thursday what it had said it intended to do more than a year ago: Unload its struggling AOL advertising-and-dial-up unit, which will face life as a standalone, publicly traded company. The move officially ends the nine-year saga of Dulles, Va.-based AOL and New York's Time Warner, which began when AOL co-founder Steve Case engineered what was hailed at the time as the first of what would be several mega-marriages between old and new media.

WASHINGTON - Time Warner Inc. announced Wednesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it intends to spin off its ailing AOL division. "Although the Company's Board of Directors has not made any decision," the company wrote in its latest quarterly report to investors, "the Company currently anticipates that it would initiate a process to spin off one or more parts of the businesses of AOL to Time Warner's stockholders, in one or a series of transactions." Time Warner's net income dropped 14 percent over the same period a year ago, mainly because of dropping revenues at AOL but also because of a suffering publishing business.

Service sector shrinks for 4th straight month WASHINGTON: The nation's service sector shrank for the fourth straight month in January, a trade group said yesterday, but at a slower pace than in the previous month. The Institute for Supply Management, a trade association of purchasing executives, said its service sector index rose to 42.9 last month, from December's downwardly revised reading of 40.1. The January reading was above analysts' expectations of 39, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

NEW YORK - Citigroup Inc. said yesterday that board member Richard Parsons - the former CEO of Time Warner - will soon be taking over as chairman. The appointment is effective Feb. 23, Citigroup said in a statement. Parsons succeeds Win Bischoff, who became chairman in December 2007. Bischoff is not putting himself up for re-election at the board's annual meeting this spring and will retire later this year, Citigroup says. The embattled bank has suffered five consecutive quarters of losses and received $45 billion in government aid as it struggles to stay afloat amid the credit crisis.

NEW YORK - The stock market's seven-week rally skidded to a halt yesterday. Stocks endured their worst drubbing in a month, and crude oil plummeted the most in more than seven years, as a batch of gruesome unemployment and corporate-profit reports reminded investors about the dire state of the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 245.40 points, or 2.7 percent, to 8,769.70. The Standard & Poor's 500 index dropped 28.05 points, or 3 percent, to 906.65. The Nasdaq composite index gave up 53.32 points, or 3.2 percent, to 1,599.

While executives of Time Warner Inc. huddled with bankers last week to discuss ways to reduce the company's $11 billion debt, the president of one of its subsidiaries flew from Los Angeles to a Sun Valley, Idaho, business meeting on one of the company's seven aircraft.Time Warner has been so concerned about its debt level that it attempted a disputed rights offering that ultimately had to be scrapped. But despite a concession on its top executives' stock-option plan, disclosed in the new rights offering to be made today, the company has not demonstrated any willingness to trim back a corporate lifestyle that is lavish even by the glitzy standards of the entertainment business.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Running out of time and options, Yahoo Inc. again rebuffed Microsoft Corp.'s buyout offer yesterday and continued to seek refuge in the arms of Time Warner Inc. Yahoo, which faces a takeover fight if it does not reach a deal with Microsoft by April 26, is trying to sell a substantial minority stake to Time Warner, according to people familiar with the talks. The deal being discussed would combine Yahoo with Time Warner's beleaguered AOL Internet unit. Time Warner's stake, if committed to support Yahoo's management against Microsoft, would make it harder for the software giant to win a threatened proxy fight.