Covering Thomson Reuters Corp for almost two years has taught me that people like to cast my company in a recurring role in media deal parlor games. Now that the company’s arch-rival Bloomberg LP will buy BusinessWeek magazine from McGraw-Hill, lots of my pals in the media world are wondering: Will Thomson Reuters buy a mainstream news or business news magazine? Or newspaper? Why not Forbes? Why not the Financial Times?

Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters likes to remind people when they ask these questions that Thomson Corp, before buying Reuters, got out of its Canadian newspaper empire for a reason. (See below)

I asked our chief executive, Tom Glocer, a question along these lines on a Thursday phone call he had with reporters to discuss the company’s third-quarter financial results.

Here is what he said:

Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part… I don’t see any particular time or reason at this juncture why we should go the other way.

Later on Thursday, when I interviewed Glocer, we returned to this theme. (I can’t help it, I’m a print guy.) I used the Financial Times, owned by Pearson Plc and beloved of its CEO, Dame Marjorie Scardino, as a sample target:

Here is Glocer’s reply:

When I came to London, Marjorie was famous for saying she would never sell the FT, or it would go “over my dead body.” There were many years in which the FT had fallen on harder times when people held that up as well: Marjorie has to go before the FT.

That sounds like a “no” on the FT. What about other properties?

Is it impossible that somewhere in the world that we’d take a print property and move it electronic? No, but we’re not looking to go out and buy consumer print publications. That’s not what we think our business is.

That sounds like a “no” on print. At that point, Chief Financial Officer Bob Daleo took over, saying that Thomson Reuters is a company where “what we shy away from are advertising-based models. We charge for content, we charge for information and news.”

What about Reuters.com, an ad-supported site that runs our news? Glocer said:

I would argue that the overwhelming amount of our news is behind the firewall in the sense that you only get it as part of a product that you pay for. It’s great that we have it. I’m very proud of reuters.com. I use it on weekends and evenings when I’m not in front of my bigger service, my subscription service.

I asked one more question on print: Why did Thomson Reuters get involved in any way at all with ZelnickMedia’s losing bid for BusinessWeek? What was that about?

We had no ownership interest or economics in the deal… We have done very similar things already. I would point you to the deal with the International Herald Tribune where Reuters supplies a couple pages’ worth of business news. So the way I’d think of it is, we have a news agency providing television, text, photos, etc…. There is no particular magic about BusinessWeek. We stand ready to do sensible, commercial deals to help deliver value to media customers, and it’s not a sort of, ‘Well the TR play is BusinessWeek.’ It never was. For a while it got reported like that because it was amusing to people.”

And that’s the last word on print…today.

Newspaper advertising is a joke, local TV stations are struggling to get ads of their own, journalists are losing their jobs and media executives are calling 25 percent revenue declines an improvement. It sounds like something might be amiss in the U.S. media world.

But don’t take our word for it if you’re the Federal Communications Commission, and you’re about to revisit media ownership regulations and see if they need some changing. See this item from Inside Radio:

[FCC] Chairman Julius Genachowski hires internet entrepreneur and journalist Steven Waldman to lead an agency-wide initiative assessing the state of media. Waldman will lead a team to conduct what’s promised to be an “open, fact-finding process” looking at how the economy is impacting media outlets and make recommendations for policy changes.

Waldman is the co-founder and former editor of the religious website Beliefnet.com, which was bought by News Corp. in 2007. … Waldman will join the Office of Strategic Planning and serve as senior advisor to the chairman. Genachowski says, “A strong consensus has developed that we’re at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn.”

Yes, but let’s make extra-special sure and hire a guy to check out the situation. You never know; everything might be just fine and we’re making a big mistake saying otherwise.

You know how it is when you take a trip to Target: You’re going to buy just that ONE THING that you need, and you’re going to keep it cheap. As you leave the store, you wonder how you dropped hundreds of dollars on things that you didn’t realize you needed until you walked into the store.

Target is hoping to spawn a similar phenomenon on its website, where it has begun offering a magazine newsstand. Rather than starting from scratch, it has signed on Zinio, a digital publishing company that offers magazines and books from more than 350 publishers.

Zinio will sell electronic versions of magazines on a page on Target’s website, either as single editions of current and older issues, or as annual subscriptions - usually at a discount. People can read them in a Web browser version or through an application that Zinio offers for download. This is similar to what they’ve done on other websites, like the one operated by Barnes & Noble.

Yes, you can already look at online versions of magazines, Zinio Chief Executive Richard Maggiotto said in an interview. This is different, however, he said: “It’s a high-fidelity, robust magazine.” In other words, these titles, ranging from Elle to Woman’s Day to Seventeen, are meant to look — if not feel — like the print magazines they are replacing. Zinio and Target will share the revenue they get from each sale.

Maggiotto declined to reveal specific goals, but said that he would be happy to see 1,000 or more new subscriptions (a month) come in during the first year of the Target partnership. So far, he said, Zinio sees about 60 percent of its magazine sales coming from archival or current issue sales, and about 40 percent from subscriptions.

This might not be such big news on most other days, but it is coming after some cataclysmic events transpired in the magazine industry. With ad sales suffering, big publishers such as Conde Nast are cutting workers and titles, making some media experts wonder whether the good times are over forever. Digital revenue has failed to make up for print revenue losses, just like in the newspaper world. But every little bit helps, right? Apparently so. Maggiotto would not say who Zinio’s next partners are, but said that “there are 10 more in the queue.”

(PS: Apologies to Tom Waits for stealing one of his lyrics for the sake of a headline. It’s from “Nighthawks at the Diner.” The photo is all Reuters)

Your Reuters media writers got a little flushed on Monday morning when we saw that Conde Nast was going to close some magazines. Would we see The New Yorker and Vanity Fair pulped? No such luck for us vultures who were craving a big murder-in-the-first-degree story. This appears to be more of a mercy killing.

Instead, here’s what we get:

• Consolidation in the bridal business. No more Modern Bride, no more Elegant Bride. Instead, we get a monthly edition of Brides magazine, the kind of phonebook-sized tome that it seems will pay for itself. After all, people love to get married, and many these days like to do it twice.
• Calorie cutting in the food format: Gourmet magazine gets purged, while the brand lives on. Or, as Media Memo’s Peter Kafka put it, it survives “Zombie-like” on TV and the Internet. Bon Appetit survives, meanwhile.
• Speaking of food, no more Cookies. Cookie magazine, the “stylish parenting magazine for the new mom,” dies. So much for news-you-can-use stories like “Parents and pot: Do you think it’s okay to smoke weed at a play date?”

Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times got an interview with Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend, who gave her the details of how this is going down. Since we’re not sure if Chuck will have time for us today (we’re hoping the phone rings presently), here’s what he said:

None of the about 180 employees of the magazines, including the Gourmet editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichl, are expected to stay with the company… The employees will receive severance packages this week and be out by the end of the week.

Other layoffs may be in the works. Mr. Townsend has asked editors and publishers of each magazine to meet certain budgets, and the executives can choose whether to lay off staff to get there. The executives’ plans are due in 10 days, Mr. Townsend said, and all layoffs should be completed by the end of the year.

This is it for magazine closures, he said, although he said three or four magazines were considering reducing their frequency.

“These businesses should be 25 percent net margin businesses,” he said. “We have had some underperformers, but not businesses that have cost us money to run except for launches and businesses like Gourmet that, with the economy, have slipped into the red.”

It would be nice to think that this is the end of the pain at Conde Nast, which already dumped Portfolio and home decor title Domino (the demise of the latter aroused much more indignation among Media File readers than I suspected it would), but it probably isn’t. Conde (our neighbor across the street in Times Square) is a publishing house full of big expense accounts and bigger reputations. It likely will do its best to protect marquee names such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, but some recent college graduate working for McKinsey as an expert consultant will figure out before too long that writing about expensive lifestyles can be done for less money. That’s something that your stylish but frugal Media File reporters have known for years.

(Reuters Photo: This is our favorite Vanity Fair magazine edition because it features Reuters founder Paul Julius Reuter, described in this 1872 profile as a man of “power and great wealth, possessing a fine house and wife and always ready to show a magnificent hospitality.”)

McGraw-Hill set Tuesday as the due date for bids for the ailing BusinessWeek magazine, and at least as of 7:30 pm eastern time, nothing at all has happened. Since this is one of those stories where I’ve encountered absolutely no fruitful sources, I’ve relied on reading the reports of other people.

So what’s going to happen to the business news weekly? Let’s catch up with the latest:

It will not go to Lazard chief Bruce Wasserstein. The owner of New York magazine has enough to deal with in the slumping publishing world already, so he’s gone, reports BusinessWeek columnist Jon Fine.

Fine himself is bowing out of the action after presenting us with most of it. He and wife Laurel Touby (a media maven in her own right) are taking a six-month sabbatical to do more fun things in other parts of the world.

Bloomberg LP remains interested, along with various other bidders, say various media reports. As you might expect, no one there is talking to us evil arch-rivals at Reuters. I hear from Bloomberg journalists that no one there is talking to them either. Too bad, because it was Bloomberg journalist Greg Bensinger who helped break the story. (And so much the worse, as Bensinger is on honeymoon at the moment.)

No matter who buys it up, New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford tells us, via a memo she obtained, that Evercore — the banker group shopping BusinessWeek — is promising 20 percent layoffs across the board, including 55 of 217 journalists. 25 percent. Ouch!

The one bit of original reporting that I can offer you comes from the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that I attended on Tuesday. I asked McGraw CEO Terry McGraw if keeping the magazine and scrapping the whole sale process is a possibility. His answer: “At this point all options are open.” He also said that this is a time for BusinessWeek to explore all options, such as going online only, or any other number of alternatives. They don’t all necessarily include selling the magazine.

My totally unfounded conjecture? He doesn’t want to sell BusinessWeek, but wants to show shareholders and his board that he gave it its best shot. Either way, Evercore gets paid.

But that is, as I said, unfounded conjecture. A deal could come at any time.

(Reuters Photo: McGraw-Hill CEO Harold “Terry” McGraw III, a man with a magazine to sell you)

CBS and Pepsi have teamed up to roll out the first ever video advertising in a print magazine next month. It will appear in the September 18th edition of Entertainment Weekly.

The mini video screen is packaged into an fixed magazine insert in the middle of the magazine. But only magazine subscribers in New York and Los Angeles will be able to see the video ads in their magazines.

The campaign, which is backed by the Pepsi Max brand, aims to promote CBS’s Monday night comedy lineup and new dramas. The ad uses video-in-print technology developed by Americhip, and features five different clips totaling 40 minutes.

CBS’s Monday night comedy features shows like “How I Met Your Mother”, “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory”.

(Photo: Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother/Reuters)

At least one subscriber of defunct hip-hop culture magazine Vibe wants to know why he’s not getting a refund — and is willing to go to court to get it.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, Alabama resident Kenneth Rogers said he purchased a one year subscription three months before the shock announcement and wants all subscribers to get their money back. Rogers sued for breach of contract and unjust enrichment for a lost subscription and is seeking class action status to allow others to join in the fight.

“As the magazine was quietly closing up the shop, the Vibe website continued to contain links to advertisements enticing customers to purchase subscriptions to the magazine,” the lawsuit says, naming Vibe Media Group as a defendant along with unnamed people associated with the magazine. Vibe should have “publicly disclosed to subscribers that it was teetering on the brink of insolvency,” it says.

It said a one-year subscription cost between $9.95 and $14.95, and Vibe, the baby of acclaimed music producer Quincy Jones (Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Off the Wall” albums included), had more than 800,000 subscribers.

Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:

U.S. business magazines face a shakeout (Reuters)
Robert MacMillan writes: “Business news publishers rubbed their hands in glee when the financial crisis grabbed headlines last fall, saying the meltdown would deliver a windfall blown in by widespread interest in their stories. It did not turn out that way. Appetite for news does not always translate into revenue, especially at a time when blogs, wire services such as Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters and other outlets crowd into news analysis territory that the big magazines had long claimed.”

McClatchy quarterly profit rises on cost cuts (Reuters)
“U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy Co reported higher quarterly income on Tuesday because of cost cuts, pushing shares up as much as 67 percent, even as advertising revenue fell by nearly a third. McClatchy, publisher of The Miami Herald and Sacramento Bee, also said it reduced the amount of debt that it owes and sought to reassure investors that it will not violate the terms of its lending agreements,” reports Robert MacMillan.

Economist Group Buys Congressional Quarterly (WSJ)
Kevin Kingsbury writes: “The deal, terms of which weren’t disclosed, will create a new company called CQ-Roll Call Group. Roll Call is owned by the Economist Group, the London-based publisher of its namesake magazine. Roll Call is buying Congressional Quarterly from Times Publishing Co., whose primary operations is the St. Petersburg Times and related assets.”

James Murdoch Approved Payment to Phone Tap Victim (Bloomberg)
“James Murdoch, the son of News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, agreed to a 700,000-pound ($1.1 million) payment to a victim of phone-tapping by the News of the World, the editor of the company’s newspaper said,” writes Robert Hutton.
> Ex-Murdoch paper editor says phone taps not policy (Reuters)

Conde Nast September Monthlies Lose 1,680 Ad Pages (NYO)
“Vogue tumbled to 427 pages total, down 36 percent from last September. W is down 53 percent; Allure and Gourmet are down 51 percent; and Self is down 50 percent. Vanity Fair came in just above average for the company, dropping 36 percent,” writes John Koblin.

In other news:

• Arbitron Q2 profit up; cuts FY rev view; shares fall (Reuters)
• Meredith Invests In Mobile Firm Hyperfactory (Mediaweek)
• Journal Communications posts 2nd-quarter loss (AP)
• Vogue To Get Its Own Web Site, Too, After Condé Launches GQ.com (Business Insider)

Here are some of the day’s top stories in the media industry:

Microsoft takes on Google as Office moves to Web (Reuters)
Jim Finkle reports: “Microsoft will offer for free to consumers Web-based versions of its Office suite of programs, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software and a note-taking program. Microsoft will also host one Internet business version of Office at its own data centers, charging companies a yet-to- be-announced fee.”

Six in 10 companies plan to skip Windows 7 (Reuters)
“Many of the more than 1,000 companies that responded to a survey by ScriptLogic Corp say they have economized by cutting back on software updates and lack the resources to deploy Microsoft’s latest offering.”

MySpace to Take Entertainment Tack (WSJ)
“In a brief interview, News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said MySpace needs to be refocused ‘as an entertainment portal.’ Mr. Murdoch described his vision for MySpace as a place where ‘people are looking for common interests,’” writes Julia Angwin.

15-Year Old Analyst Trashes TV, Newspapers, Radio, And…Twitter (Business Insider)
“A 15 year-old working in Morgan Stanley’s London office has written what may be the firm’s most popular research report in years,” writes Henry Blodget. “In it, he explains that none of his friends read newspapers and few watch TV. He also, interestingly, says none of them use Twitter, because no one reads the tweets texting costs money.”

McGraw-Hill trying to sell BusinessWeek (Reuters)
Jui Chakravorty Das and Robert MacMillan report: “McGraw-Hill Cos Inc is trying to sell BusinessWeek magazine, a source told Reuters on Monday, at a time when media advertising sales are slumping and would-be buyers for newspapers and magazines are scarce. McGraw hired boutique investment bank Evercore Partners Inc to manage the sale, said the source, who was familiar with the situation but not authorized to discuss it publicly.”

In other news:

• At $6.5 Billion, Facebook is Now Worth More than CBS (Mashable)
  
• Magna Forecast: Ad Recession to Drag On (E&P)
  

Here’s an entry from our very own Reuters New York equities team summer intern Chavon Sutton. (Thanks, Chavon!)

Did Vibe magazine, the print ambassador of hip-hop culture, voice and style, pass up a chance to survive last year?

Vibe, the baby of acclaimed producer Quincy Jones (the composer who produced the late Michael Jackson’s mega-hit albums, “Thriller” and “Off the Wall,”), said earlier this week that it was shutting down immediately.

A partnership with an online gossip website serving African-American readers, might have given it room to keep producing, according to the site’s founder and editor.

Fred Mwangaguhunga, who runs Mediatakeout.com, told us that in the year before Vibe’s collapse, it offered the magazine a revenue-share deal, but Vibe refused.

“We came to Vibe and offered it a deal where they’d sell our ads and in return, they’d get a stake in the ads they sold,” Mwangagunhunga said.

The partnership could have given Vibe “$1 million a month, but they didn’t want it,” he said.
$1 million a month? Hard to say. (For what it’s worth, Mwangaguhunga says Mediatakeout.com gets 3 to 5 million unique viewers and 150 million page impressions per month.)

We tried to reach Vibe, or whatever is left of it, but a computerized voicemail message at the magazine’s office said: “Message quota exceeded. Goodbye.”

Did Vibe take a wise pass in the hopes of striking a better online deal? Or do its actions suggest that it is another example of entrenched print types avoiding imminent change?

It could be a pointless question. Jones told EbonyJet.com that he plans to buy back the magazine, which had a circulation of over 800,000, according to The New York Times.

Incidentally, Ebony apparently isn’t interested in working with Mediatakeout either.

“We made the same proposal to Ebony [magazine] which is facing pressure now,” he said.  “I’m not sure why they’re saying no.”

(Photo: Reuters)