Op-Ed Columnist: The Fall of the Wall?

On Wednesday night, I bumped into Norman Pearlstine at a charity dinner. He smiled his inscrutable smile and made the smallest of small talk. He looked off into space and seemed otherwise occupied.

Which, it turns out, he was. The next morning came the announcement that Pearlstine was leaving the Bloomberg media empire to return to his old haunt, Time Inc., where he had been editor in chief from 1995 to 2005. This time around at Time Inc., his title is chief content officer.

As editor in chief, an important part of Pearlstine's job had been to maintain the wall that was supposed to separate the editorial staff from the business-side staff. The managing editors of the various publications all reported to the editor in chief rather than to the company's chief executive, who, in turn, was supposed to protect the editors from commercial pressures. In Time Inc. parlance, this has long been known as the divide between Church (editorial) and State (advertising and circulation).

Yet the press release announcing Pearlstine's return had to make anyone who cared about the journalistic integrity of Time Inc.'s magazines a little nervous. First of all, it said the editor in chief title was being abolished, and its current occupant, Martha Nelson, ushered out the door. Second, the new chief executive, Joe Ripp, talked openly about getting the business side and the editorial side to work together.

And then there was Pearlstine himself. Early in his first stint at Time Inc., he wrote a passionate, now-legendary memo insisting on the importance of the Church-State divide. Now? "I look forward to forging a new sense of partnership between the creative and business sides of Time Inc.," he was quoted as saying. There are a lot of former Time Inc. journalists who fear that Pearlstine's appointment is a fig leaf, masking the final capitulation of Time Inc.'s content to the severe business pressures that affect the company — pressures that are exacerbated as it prepares to spin off from its parent, Time Warner. I have to be honest: I'm one of them.

In truth, the wall between Church and State was never as concrete as the Time Inc. mythology would suggest. Henry Luce, after all, was both editor in chief and chief executive, and while he might not have been afraid to tick off advertisers, he had no compunction about slanting Time magazine's journalism to suit his political views.

When Life magazine began to founder as a weekly publication in the 1960s, its editors worked hand in glove with the business side as they tried to revive it. I spent a decade at Fortune magazine, a time that coincided with Pearlstine's tenure as editor in chief. In my experience, I found that we were willing to take on big advertisers like I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard. But we also made dozens of small compromises that were intended to keep advertisers happy.

Meanwhile, the authority of the editor in chief gradually diminished. Henry Grunwald, the powerful editor in chief from 1979 to 1987, sat on the company's board of directors, as had his predecessors. Then several years after Warner Brothers merged with Time Inc., Jason McManus, perhaps the company's most ineffectual editor in chief, was kicked off the board. When Pearlstine was hired in 1995, he became the first editor in chief who had to report to the Time Inc. chief executive rather than the board. And so it went. John Huey replaced Pearlstine only to preside over several brutal rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting. When Huey left in 2012, Nelson took the seat. I always had the sense that they fought the good fight, but it had become an increasingly uphill battle.

Time Inc. has struggled mightily for the last decade or more. Partly this is because all print publications have struggled in the Internet Age. But it's also because Time Warner has treated its magazine division as a cash cow. Had it been willing to reinvest in Time Inc. — had it treated its magazine division as something to be nurtured instead of milked — well, perhaps it wouldn't have had to replace its editor in chief with a chief content officer.

Not surprisingly, when I spoke to Pearlstine on Friday, he insisted that Time Inc.'s journalistic standards would not be compromised. The fact that the magazine's managing editors will report not only to him, but also to a business executive — another change Ripp announced Thursday — didn't faze him at all. He praised the model being developed by Forbes magazine, which includes "sponsored" content alongside the work of its staff writers. He said that the business side would not be able to hire an editor unless he went along with it.

And maybe he'll turn out to be right. The more likely outcome, though, is that the much-vaunted Church-State divide at Time Inc. is dead.