Among Time Warner's sleek fleet of publications, Time, Money, Fortune and Sports Illustrated get most of the ink. Often overlooked is Business 2.0 in San Francisco, whose ranks include staffers from the original Business 2.0 magazine, the now-defunct eCompany Now, and a handful of new hires. The magazine has 550,000 paid subscribers.

	There is internally a surprisingly strong understanding of what our mission is.

An editorial staffer at Business 2.0, who agreed to be quoted on background, says: "Honestly, I have not noticed any stress over the AOL TW issues, including the recent record loss. I'm pretty sure our magazine is part of the 'publishing' breakout in the financials, which had very strong year-over-year growth." (The company's latest Form 10-Q quarterly report is on file with the SEC here.)

"I think a few things are at work. One, Time Inc. has a very strong culture and respected tradition of editorial strength and excellence. Two, the economy sucks, so in comparison to other outlets, B2/Time Inc./AOL TW look strong. Would you rather be at CNET? Or the Herring? Or MarketWatch?"

Synergy has slowly begun to take hold, the staffer says. "Writers cross-pollinate a lot, so there are people from SI and Money and from time to time Fortune and Time contributing to our site. There is some good synergy between AOL and our site. People on our Web team know what the AOL team likes to tease and so our site will get plenty of promotion from AOL. They pretty well knew AOL would like the Mariah Carey part of our 101 Dumbest Moments in Business list, because she looked hot in the picture and has mass pop appeal. So that got a promo on AOL, which in turn brought us lots of traffic."

As for the print publication, the staffer says, "I know this might sound like bullshit, but I really like the magazine we put out. The editors are very sharp, with backgrounds at Fortune and WSJ and Wired and Outside and Time and so on. It is reasonably well staffed; there are enough editors and writers and fact checkers -- yes, fact checkers.  The editors say 'no' often when selecting story ideas and they demand a lot in terms of great fresh precise information to fill out a story. People work hard and stay late, but they also wear jeans and T-shirts to work." (Apparently they haven't taken the advice of a Business Week columnist who thinks AOL TW's troubles stem from a lack of suits and ties.)
 
So far, the magazine's journalism hasn't been adversely affected by the corporate parent's merger with AOL, the staffer says. Published reports suggest the same holds true at other AOL Time Warner publications such as Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune.

"There is internally a surprisingly strong understanding of what our mission is, best summed up in Brian Arthur's essay for us on past tech bubbles and how long it took society to understand and integrate and reorient around new tech to truly exploit it. We understand that we need to be differentiated from Fortune in terms of story selection and covers. And now that the company has named new editors at People, Teen People, Sports Illustrated, In Style and now Business 2, it's clear the company wants to see faster subscription growth and a stronger bottom line."

Two months back, Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine visited to the Business 2.0 offices and told the San Francisco Chronicle that the company was committing resources to building Business 2.0  because it believed in taking "the longer view," despite the current tech slump.

Of course, Pearlstine also claimed he wasn't in town to clean house, and the top editor of Business 2.0 was ousted a couple of weeks later.

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