After seven attempts to line up interviews with AOL Time Warner executives through its corporate communications department -- these folks make the Taliban look like slackers, says a reporter friend at a national newspaper -- we threw up our hands.

Instead, we went through back channels and managed to obtain an interview on background with an executive at AOL Time Warner, who agreed to be quoted without attribution so that readers could get a fuller understanding of how the company's media units are interacting.

	People at the company  really get the idea that you have to have a quality product and not stuff crap down people's throats.

"The interesting story is that people at the company -- especially editorial but also the business folks -- really get the idea that you have to have a quality product and not stuff crap down people's throats," the executive says. "One of the things I find heartening is that while there's a great desire to have synergy and cross-promotion, it's also a company with an awareness of how important it is to do a great job and don't screw the audience and mess up the credibility of your product.

"AOL, frankly, is learning a great deal of that from the Time Warner brands. It's a step forward in sophistication for AOL, which has never had a lot of people with a background in editorial. Remember, until 1995 the AOL service didn't even have ads, and now we have all these editorial assets and advertising and services that need to be integrated into a good audience experience. And we're figuring out how to do a good job for our audience while making money.

"For a long time, the AOL service saw itself as a promotional vehicle rather than an editorial experience. Now that things like e-mail and instant messaging have become a commonplace commodity, part of AOL's value lies in giving people a fuller, richer experience. CNN and Warner Brothers and Time.com already knew how to do that, and AOL is learning how to become a media company, too."

With 89,300 employees, the company has major holdings in the magazine, broadcast, cable, television, film, book, music and Internet industries. Behold the empire:

• AOL (including CompuServe, Netscape, Moviefone and MapQuest)
• Time Inc. (Time, Sports Illustrated, People, Fortune, Money, In Style, Entertainment Weekly, Business 2.0, Parenting, Teen People, Sunset)
• Turner Broadcasting (including CNN, TBS, TNT, the Atlanta Braves and Hawks)
• AOL Time Warner Book Group (Warner Books, Little, Brown and Co.)
• HBO and Cinemax
• Warner Brothers (Warner Bros. Pictures ["Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"], the WB network, Castle Rock Entertainment)
• New Line Cinema ("The Lord of the Rings," "Rush Hour 2"),
• Time Warner Cable (including TV news stations in New York, Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas)
• Warner Music Group (Atlantic, Elektra, Warner Bros. Records)

Facing such an embarrassment of riches presents opportunities but also a daunting challenge for the company's online efforts. For a major event like the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards, it's likely that many of those news organizations will send staffers and provide individual coverage.

"Last year, we had lots of separate Oscar efforts online, but we didn't provide a unified package," the executive says. "This year we had a much more thought-out threading scheme to highlight content on the different sites. We wound up with 10 times more traffic, 700 million page views and three times the revenues.

"Next year, instead of a team of 70 people from [links]People.com and Entertainment Weekly and In Style all creating content, we hope that by setting up best practices we can find the synergy opportunities to provide the same great coverage with 20 people."

Growing pains, but mutual respect

With all the different editorial and business silos involved, those kinds of efforts don't always come easily. "There have been a lot of growing pains," the executive adds. "But one of the surprising things is that the kinds of political bickering you read about in the press you don't see on the operational level between the different brands. People appreciate the traffic that the AOL or Time Warner brands can bring, so there's a high regard for the chance to have synergy across the different sites and expose millions of more readers to the journalism we have to offer."

For those concerned that the AOL-Time Warner marriage would lead to a diminution of editorial independence, with twenty-something AOL hotshots making questionable demands of their Old Media counterparts, the evidence suggests the contrary.

"AOL Time Warner is still very much church and state, so everybody owns their own editorial decision-making process," the executive says. "Editors from AOL and the Time Warner brands hold joint meetings to share and distribute content, but they're not there to discuss creation of content. Throughout the company, content is very decentralized and each site or publication retains its own core autonomous editorial team."

Convergence has gotten a bad rap in the press lately -- deservedly so -- with AOL Time Warner as the poster child for the difficulties of making convergence work.

But convergence, the executive says, is not about throwing everything into the same pot  and creating a new kind of media stew. It's about repackaging and streamlining and tailoring existing content for new audiences.

"A lot of thinking at AOL is about how to present these brands in a coherent way, with a growing awareness that we need to focus more on audience-driven programming. For example, television and radio have shows for different demographics, and we need to figure out better ways to get the right content in front of an audience of 60-year-olds and 21-year-olds and 12- to 14-year-olds."

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