Media

Redesign of Time.com debuts

The much-delayed multimillion-dollar redesign of Time.com finally debuted Wednesday night.

The top-to-bottom renovation, which was first expected to be complete last year, will showcase on Thursday morning a panoramic photo taken from near the top of One World Trade Center, a shot that also serves as a wraparound cover on the print edition that hits newsstands the following day.

The yearlong project also includes a softcover book, a behind-the-scenes look at the historic construction of 1 WTC.

View from the Top of the Freedom Tower.Jonathan D. Woods and Michael Franz for TIME

The redesign comes as Time.com is hiring a staff of 35 people in hopes of kindling growth as it prepares the second-quarter spinoff from Time Warner.

It recently unveiled plans to chop 500 from across Time Inc.

“I think it is the most dramatic overhaul of our structure we’ve ever seen in Time Inc.’s history,” said Time Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs about the Time.com push and the funding that Time Inc. Executive Vice President Todd Larsen squeezed out of the cost-conscious media giant.

“We have new editors covering national affairs, international affairs, society — pretty much every area that we cover I have a new leadership team in place,” Gibbs said.

Many insiders are wondering if the changes will be enough to help right a ship that has been listing dangerously.

But early returns, with the enhanced content on the original website, are encouraging. The site had 22 million unique visitors in February, up more than 100 percent from a year earlier, according to comScore.

Nevertheless, that result still puts Time in the back of the pack among news sites, and that battle is likely to intensify.

Up until now, Time.com was part of the CNN Network, which has the No. 3 site, with 116.7 million unique visitors. When Time Inc. is spun off, its link with CNN will disappear.

The No. 1 news site, Yahoo!-ABC News Network, pulls in 126 million uniques across all platforms.

Changes at Time.com are expected to set the stage for a soon-to-be-announced Sports Illustrated overhaul.

It remains to be seen how Wall Street will view the changes. Insiders concede that Time still draws the bulk of its ads from mass-circulation magazines which have been the hardest hit by the defection to digital.

Over the past decade, Time Inc.’s profit has plunged from $1.3 billion in 2004 to $420 million last year.

How well it does in the digital push, which is admittedly a minority portion of its revenue base, may well determine the reception the media company gets from Wall Street after it is spun off before the end of the second quarter.