Barry Diller’s Dotdash Agrees to Buy Meredith, a Magazine Giant

Magazines have been crunched in recent years by readers’ preference for digital over print, where advertising is both less lucrative and dominated by tech companies.

Charles Whitaker, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, said that in purchasing Time Inc., Meredith had been “wildly optimistic about the extent to which acquiring those brands would create these economies of scale and synergies that would help them fend off the Googles and Facebooks of the world.”

He added, “This continued consolidation is obviously troubling. The more competition and the more companies that we have producing content, providing jobs and appealing to audiences is better for the industry.”

Meredith slimmed itself down considerably in the years since its purchase of Time Inc., shedding three prominent Time Inc. titles that did not fit the company’s specialty — magazines about style, fashion, celebrity news and homemaking.

Time magazine, the flagship, went to Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and his wife, Lynne, for $190 million later in 2018. The company also sold Fortune, for $150 million, to Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a scion of a prominent Thai family, and Sports Illustrated, for $110 million, to Authentic Brands Group. (A.B.G. later sold Sports Illustrated to TheMaven, which last month renamed itself the Arena Group.)

Meredith also sold another asset it had picked up in the Time Inc. deal — Time Inc. U.K., the publisher of Woman’s Weekly and Wallpaper magazines — to the London private equity firm Epiris for a reported $167 million. In June, Meredith announced the sale of its local media properties, which included 17 television stations in Atlanta, Phoenix and other markets, to Gray Television in a $2.8 billion deal.

If the planned merger goes through, Dotdash Meredith will be a top-10 publisher in terms of audience size, according to the internet metrics service Comscore, the companies said.