Time... they are a-changing... Cnet has a story about Time laying off a number of senior executives, mostly from its business side, as part of a major restructuring. The notable part of the article comes towards the end, where it discusses Carl Icahn and Steve Case's gripes about the value of print in the age of digital media. You remember Steve Case, right? He's the one that merged his company, digital darling (at the time) AOL, with TimeWarner, specifically to get access to the content that TimeWarner controlled. Now he thinks that its content lacks relevance? Either Stevie has some other tricks up his sleeve, or once again is demonstrating a bad sense of, um, Time-ing. Back when AOL and TimeWarner joined forces, pundits praised the move as a brilliant marriage of new media and old, content distribution network and content provider, audience and message. Somehow AOL managed to screw it up (though plummeting online media budgets didn't help). In its aftermath, folks like Google and Overture have emerged to re-invent online media (primarily through targeted search ads), not to mention folks like Claria. So what gives? Clearly there's a lot to be gained in shareholder value by splitting the company into more easily understood businesses. But when you look at how the long-promised convergence finally may come to pass (more on this in the coming days), it seems that companies that excel at content, its delivery, or some combination, stand to benefit quite a bit. And you can print that.  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments