In a shocking shake-up at Time Inc., media veteran Norman Pearlstine is returning as the company’s first ever chief content officer while Martha Nelson is out as editor-in-chief.
The realignment atop the giant publisher, effective immediately, is the first big move by relatively new CEO Joe Ripp, who is preparing to spin off the company from parent Time Warner sometime next year.
Nelson’s position is being eliminated completely. Going forward, individual magazine editors will report to the heads of business.
“It was a total surprise,” said one insider. “Nobody saw this coming.”
The moves are being greeted with mixed emotions inside the 91-year- old magazine behemoth.
“It’s the end of church and state,” one source lamented. “They can gild it anyway they want, but it is the end of an era.”
“Ripp wanted to send a message to the Street that he was blowing the place up,” added another insider, “and he did.”
Some, however, saw promise and said that Time, with its strict church-state divide — editorial and ad sales — was hamstrung in the changing media world because rivals could do deals with advertisers and marketers that Time could not.
“This is a critical move away from a 1980s-style management structure that was Time Inc.,” said Peter Kreisky, who, in 2011, was a consultant and former aide to the short-lived CEO Jack Griffin.
Allowing editors to work with the business side will speed up decision making, Ripp said, adding: “We need to be faster to market.”
In a memo to staffers about the shake-up, Ripp wrote, “We believe effective collaboration across business and editorial lines is imperative if we are to succeed as an independent company. With the headwinds facing our industry, we must approach our business through a more entrepreneurial lens and break free from bureaucracy.”
Pearlstine and Ripp, in a bid to calm jittery nerves, held a meeting late Thursday in the Time & Life headquarters with all the top managing editors.
“I would not be coming back if I was not assured that the commitment to editorial independence and integrity will be as strong as it ever was,” Pearlstine told Media Ink. “It is an important tradition at Time Inc.”
Pearlstine, 71, served as Time Inc.’s editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2005, an era marked by major upheaval in the top ranks of its major magazines.
He moved on to private-equity giant Carlyle Group before joining Bloomberg in 2008 as its chief content officer. There, he was credited with overseeing the acquisition of BusinessWeek.
Nelson — a 20-year veteran of the company who launched InStyle — succeeded John Huey as editor-in-chief in January and until recently had been serving as an internal cheerleader of the proposed spinoff. She was the first woman elevated to the editor-in-chief job.
Nelson had balked when Ripp first broached the idea of a new editorial lineup with a chief content officer instead of an EIC, sources said.
So Ripp made the changes and left Nelson out of the picture.
As part of the shift, the editors of the individual titles will report to the president of one of three magazine groups: David Geithner, Style & Entertainment (People); Evelyn Webster, Lifestyle (Real Simple); and Todd Larsen, News & Sports (Sports Illustrated and Time).
The editors will have a “dotted-line relationship” to Pearlstine. That means it will take two to hire — Pearstine and the group president — but either can fire.
Ripp has expressed disdain for the posh, walled-off offices on the 34th floor of the Time & Life Building — where the top executives currently work.
“I’d like to work in a much more collaborative environment,” he said.
In addition, Maurice Edelson, Time Inc.’s executive vice president and general counsel, is headed to parent Time Warner as senior vice president and deputy general counsel.
Edelson was seen as a powerful behind-the-scenes figure who had played a key role in Griffin’s 2011 ouster and was part of the triumvirate that ran Time Inc. for most of 2011 after the coup.
He also threw roadblocks up to some of the deals that the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was proposing for Time Inc. on the iPad Newsstand.
Lon Jacobs, former senior vice president and group general counsel at News Corp. (which owns The Post), is replacing Edelson as executive vice president and general counsel at Time Inc