Start packing!
The Time Inc. sign officially went up in the window at the magazine publishing giant’s new corporate headquarters in downtown Manhattan on Wednesday.
By the end of the month, the first publications start vacating the storied Rockefeller Center home in the Time & Life Building, which Sports Illustrated and other titles in the stable have called home since 1959.
The new address for Time Inc.’s 2,800 employees is 225 Liberty St.
The open-space layout will require a lot less acreage — about 700,000 square feet, down from the current 1.2 million square feet.
At its peak, Time employed 5,000 people in Rock Center, but the number has been drifting downward for years.
One noticeable change in the new home: The Life name has finally and officially been given the old heave-ho.
The new name — and the sign in the window — is simply: Time Inc.
Life stopped publishing as a weekly way back in 1972. It survived as a monthly until 2002 — and still lives on, in fact, in special issues and bookazines, such as the recent one-off title on Pope Francis.
Its Rock Center home, however, was always identified as the Time & Life Building.
Real Simple Editor Kristin van Ogtrop will get a real-life lesson on how to unclutter office space as they evacuate on Oct. 30 and take up residence in the new digs on Nov. 2.
The other pioneers in the new Time Inc. settlement will be Ariel Foxman and company from InStyle, Clare McHugh, editor of the All You and Health titles, and Vanessa DeLuca, Essence editor.
They’ll all be palling around on the ninth floor of the new building, a block away and across a highway from One World Trade Center, where Condé Nast is housed.
On Nov. 16, the old American Express title Food & Wine, with Editor-in-Chief Dana Cowin, moves into the fourth floor with Travel & Leisure’s Nathan Lump.
That’s also when the first weeklies arrive. Jess Cagle, editorial director of People and Entertainment Weekly, and his trusted sidekick, EW Editor Henry Goldblatt, move onto the eighth floor on Nov. 16.
Nancy Gibbs will transfer the flagship Time title on the day before Thanksgiving and take up new residence on Nov. 30 on the seventh floor, along with Money Editor Diane Harris, Golf Editor David Clarke and the kids table: Time for Kids and Sports Illustrated Kids.
A few days later, on Dec. 4, Sports Illustrated, headed by Paul Fichtenbaum, moves into the seventh floor — followed three days later by its floor mate, Fortune, helmed by Managing Editor Alan Murray.
J.R. McCabe’s spanking new Video studios — which are expected to play a big role as the empire attempts to pull more revenue from Time Inc.’s digital operations — is based on the fifth floor, but they won’t have to pull stakes until Dec. 18 and arrive in the new digs Dec. 21.
The executive team, including CEO Joe Ripp, will be open for business in their new offices on Dec. 14.
Ripp has said he does not expect the offices to be plagued by the rat infestation that troubled Anna Wintour and the Vogue staff when Condé Nast moved in a year ago at One World Trade Center.
Ripp will be surrounded by a burgeoning roster of executive vice presidents. The lineup has swollen to 11 corporate-wide.
They are expected to get offices, while most of the other staffers are in open-floor seating.
Not everyone is moving downtown.
About 400 people will move into 135 W. 50th St., which once had a bridge leading into the Avenue of the Americas’ Time & Life Building.
Making the move one block west will be Richard David Story and his staff from Departures. They will be housed on the fourth floor. This Old House Editor Scott Omelianuk gets to share the 10th floor at that address with the bean counters from central finance.
The pesky Time Inc. Alumni Association — which gets together periodically to complain about how screwed up the new company is — are also going to Siberia — that is, the 50th Street address.
As Media Ink was the first to report, a lot of the tech and engineering people will not be making the move downtown or farther west.
Instead, 300 people in those areas will move to Industry City in Brooklyn during Christmas week, starting Dec. 21.
The facilities there, which have been undergoing a crash remodeling, will include some of the people assigned to Chief Technology Officer Colin Bodell’s team, as well as product engineers and the editorial staff of Senior Vice President Matt Bean, running the new digital verticals, The Foundry and The Drive.
The company was originally hoping to make the Brooklyn facility dog-friendly, with the hope it could induce some of the pooch-loving techies from the West Coast to make the leap east.
But at the end of the day, it has the same pet regulations as the rest of the company: No dogs allowed.