John Papanek, 40, the managing editor of Sports Illustrated (SI), was, on Levin’s orders, made an offer he couldn’t refuse. On April 24 he was appointed to the new post of director of new media at Time. He was replaced at SI by his predecessor, Mark Mulvoy, who had since become publisher but returned to perform both jobs.

Some saw it as a demotion of Papanek, but he was anything but grieving in his new 34th floor office on the corporate floor of the Time-Life Building, where he was still struggling to link up his new multimedia equipment. “I’ve got the best job in the company,” he said.

‘EXTENDING THE REACH’ INTO NEW FORMS

That job is to develop a strategy for integrating the company’s magazines and books with new technologies. “We needed to get someone into this job right away,” said Time Inc. president Reg Brack. “In John, we’ve got a guy who’s really passionate about these new technologies and who has the journalistic skills and creative flair to make it all happen. John’s mission will be to take our magazines and extend their reach into other media forms.”

“Any technology that you can think of that represents a potential crossover for print is John’s charge,” said Jason McManus, editor-in-chief of all the Time Inc. magazines, to whom Papanek jointly reports with Brack.

He’s all ears. Papanek’s first task was described by McManus as a “tour of the horizon,” which Papanek interprets as developing a near- and long-term strategy for all the company’s print properties, a task that he thinks will take him several months. In his first week on the job he has heard from everyone “from wacko game developers to major hardware companies. So far, I’m just listening,” he says.

Papanek has a healthy skepticism of new media’s promise. Although he clearly loves playing with his new PowerBook 170, he is not buying into it being a book, let alone a magazine.

A LONG WAY TO GO

“I was reading Jurassic Park (a Voyager Expanded Book) on it in bed last night. It was wonderful, the screen was bright and my wife was able to fall asleep,” he says. “But then the next morning on the way to work, I noticed everybody reading the Daily News, for which they only paid 40 cents, which they probably read one-sixth of, and which they threw away when finished.” Hefting his PowerBook in one hand and a tablet of yellow legal paper in the other, he adds, “We’ve got a long way yet to go.”

But don’t interpret this as a Luddite’s view. It is worth noting that Papanek was the youngest managing editor (the top post at Time Inc. magazines) among editorial luminaries at the company and is very comfortable with new technologies. Prior to his appointment at SI, he was the founding editor of SI for Kids, a three-year old start-up for 8- to 13-year-olds. He created it with Macs at a time when the company was still wedded to an Atex-fronted centralized mainframe pagination system.

Editorially, the new magazine won accolades for the way it involved young readers with bind-ins, contests and puzzles — a print equivalent of interactivity, then a novel idea at Time Inc. magazines.

More collaboration with Warner New Media. Papanek is expected to be the magazines’ point man with Warner New Media. Only two products have come to market as a result of joint ventures between WNM and the old Time Inc. A hastily produced cd-rom from Time on the Gulf War won praise for its sprint to the market (six weeks from the final master) but it was clumsy, slow and lacking the panache of its print equivalent.

Another disk on the last solar eclipse, “The View from Earth,” done in conjunction with a Time-Life Books series on the heavens, has just been released. A cd-rom on the Berlin Wall has been delayed for nearly a year but is now slated to be out next month, as is Sports Illustrated Almanac, a reference guide for trivia nuts. The synergies between WNM and Time Inc. have been slow to materialize and have failed to ignite the market.

AWESOME OPPORTUNITIES

“Over the past couple of years they would come through here looking for someone to dance with,” Papanek admits. “But there were few takers.” He says that a combination of budget restraints and the editors’ lack of time and interest prevented much more collaboration. Once he has his plan in place later this year, that should change.

And the opportunities are awesome. The content resources at Papanek’s disposal are some of the richest in all media: Time, Fortune, Life, SI, Money, People, Entertainment Weekly, Martha Stewart Living, Health and Parenting. The company also owns Sunset and the magazines of Southern Progress Corp., which include Southern Living. Time-Life Books is the largest publisher of continuity series with editions worldwide. Little, Brown & Co., Bullfinch Press and Warner Books are their trade titles. The company also holds a 21.9 percent interest in CNN.

Sean Callahan