I love the new corporate term for shitty advertising: "Premium Content"
A Low-Key View From the Top at AOL
By Harry Berkowitz
STAFF WRITER
December 15, 2002
There could hardly be a speech by a major media executive that was less filled with hype.
It was nothing like the speeches media moguls made in the 1990s, as they touted the supposedly unlimited prospects for bigger and bigger, more complex mergers, full of synergy and soaring profits.
Richard Parsons was presenting a progress report on himself, on the world's biggest media company and on the media industry at the UBS Warburg annual media conference in Manhattan last week.
"We haven't effectively figured out how to manage the things we created - and that's our challenge," Parsons said of the media industry and of the "complicated" enterprise AOL Time Warner had become.
The low-key speech came one year and five days after he was named to succeed Gerald Levin as chief executive of AOL Time Warner - and nearly two years after America Online and Time Warner completed the biggest media merger ever.
To Parsons, 54, who grew up in a tough neighborhood in Queens, has fallen the job of making this megamerger work. He brings to the job a background as a conciliator well schooled in the worlds of politics, law and finance.
Add entertainment to that resum
