Time is shutting down Life -- in print anyway

In a move that provides lots of opportunity for bad puns and not-so-apt analogies, Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) is shutting down Life. Life was once a big, bold glossy with historic significance in the magazine world, but has been just a newspaper insert for the past few years. The company is going to keep the area alive online. If you have been reading about the massive declines in newspaper run rates month after month, then this may come as a very small shock. This is not Life's first closure, but it will probably the last as far as the print world goes. But it isn't that expensive to keep it running online, so for now Life isn't totally dead.

Time Warner shares are up today, thanks to the Bear Stearns upgrade from a "peer perform" rating to a new "Outperform" rating. The research note cites that the company will be making major restructurings to many business units in the next 12 to 18 months and even hinted at a strategic event at AOL. Unfortunately, this outperform rating only has a $23 target and that's only a 15% move from today's $19.95 price. The stock has also traded up slightly above that level on its own.

The demise of Life may be a signal of more things coming down the road for the weeklies and dailies in the publishing world. Newspapers are likely to see some major changes coming. It would be ironic to see how many newspaper executives actually rely on newspapers for information now themselves and how many own PDA's they use to read news on.

Jon Ogg is a partner in 24/7 Wall St., LLC; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.