Ted Turner died yesterday at 87, and the obituaries are appropriately full of CNN, the Braves, the America’s Cup, the bison, and the billion-dollar pledge to the U.N.
But there is a small, largely forgotten chapter of his story that is notable for its impact on shaping legal media as we know it today. It was because of a run-in with Turner that Steven Brill, arguably the most influential figure in the modern history of legal journalism, a man who, according to The New York Times, “revolutionized legal coverage,” sold out and got out.
Brill’s exit in 1997 — and Turner’s role in it — shaped the ownership structure of The American Lawyer, the ALM group of national and regional legal newspapers, Court TV, and Counsel Connect, the early online community for lawyers that prefigured everything we now take for granted about online legal community and content.
It also, as I’ll explain later, directly shaped my career.
The Background
Brill founded The American Lawyer in 1979, two years out of Yale Law School. Over the next decade he built it into the dominant trade publication covering the business of law firms, launched a chain of regional legal newspapers, and in 1989 conceived Court TV, which went on the air on July 1, 1991, as a joint venture among Time Warner, NBC (through Cablevision), Liberty Media, and Brill’s own American Lawyer Media. The Menendez brothers’ first trial, and then O.J. Simpson, made Court TV briefly indispensable.
By the mid-1990s, Brill held a 20% stake in American Lawyer Media — the publishing side — but no equity in Court TV itself. Time Warner held a controlling interest in ALM and a one-third stake in the cable network. It was, as Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott later put it, a “Rube Goldberg contraption” of overlapping ownership. Brill wanted to clean it up. In early 1996, he lined up financing to buy out both Court TV and ALM and merge them into a single company under his control.
Where Turner Comes In
Then Time Warner announced it was buying Turner Broadcasting. The deal closed in October 1996, and with it Ted Turner became vice chairman of Time Warner — and acquired effective authority over what Time Warner did with its cable assets. Court TV was now one of those assets.
Brill described what happened next in a memo to his staff. “Just as we were putting pen to paper, Time Warner announced its intention to buy Turner and decided to put this deal on hold,” he wrote. “This fall I thought I had gotten the deal going again but that was not to be.” When Brill revived the buyout in late 1996, sources told Variety at the time that Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, NBC and Liberty were all willing to sell. Turner said no.
The reason, according to people close to the company, was twofold. Turner thought Court TV was valuable — it was reported to have turned a profit in 1996 — and he viewed it as a complement, not a competitor, to his cable empire. There was also a more pointed concern: Court TV’s gavel-to-gavel trial coverage, which famously refused to break for commercials during important testimony, had at times pulled viewers away from CNN. Whatever the precise mix of motives, Turner was not going to let the network walk out the door to Brill.
In February 1997, Brill announced he was leaving both Court TV and American Lawyer Media. He sold his 20% stake in ALM back to Time Warner, which then turned around and sold the publishing business — The American Lawyer, the regional legal newspapers, and Counsel Connect — to Bruce Wasserstein’s investment firm, Wasserstein Perella & Co.
(Time Warner kept Court TV. Years later, in 2006, it would buy out Liberty’s remaining stake for $735 million and fold the network into Turner Broadcasting; in 2008 it rebranded the channel as TruTV.)
Brill’s reported payout from his exit was in the eight figures; one later account put it at $30 million.
That was the end of Brill’s time in legal media. He never came back.
What It Meant For Legal Media
It is hard to overstate how much of the modern legal media landscape was set in motion by these few months in 1996 and 1997.
The American Lawyer and the regional newspapers — which included Legal Times in Washington, The Recorder in San Francisco, the New Jersey Law Journal, Texas Lawyer, and others — went to Wasserstein. Wasserstein then went on to acquire Law Journal Publishing — which included The National Law Journal and the New York Law Journal — and Philadelphia-based Legal Communications Ltd. — publisher of The Legal Intelligencer, then the oldest daily legal newspaper in the United States, and other legal publications — creating the largest legal journalism company in the United States and, in 1999, launching Law.com, one of the leading legal news websites in the world. Since then, ALM has changed hands several times since, most recently through the merger of ALM and Law Business Research.
Counsel Connect, ALM’s early and ambitious experiment in online legal community, never found a sustainable path under its new owners and was wound down, eventually to be replaced by Law.com. Court TV drifted away from serious legal journalism and ultimately disappeared as a brand. And Brill, with the proceeds of the sale, launched Brill’s Content in 1998, a media-watchdog magazine, and went on to Clear (yes, the one that speeds you through airport security), Journalism Online, NewsGuard, and a string of books. But he never built another legal media property.
One can argue counterfactuals all day. Maybe a Brill-controlled, merged Court TV and ALM would have built a much-different multi-media legal empire. Maybe it would have collapsed under the same financial pressures that the actual properties faced. We will never know — all because Ted Turner said no.
How This Impacted My Career
A footnote to this backstory is how it impacted my career.
In the 1990s, I began publishing the first-ever Internet newsletter for lawyers, in partnership with the above-mentioned Legal Communications Ltd. (LCL). In 1997, when Time Warner decided to sell off American Lawyer Media, LCL decided to make a bid. It retained me to help with due diligence. For several months, I traveled around the country to the various ALM regional offices, meeting with publishers and editors and learning about their operations.
LCL lost that bid to Wasserstein, and, as mentioned above, Wasserstein turned around and scooped up LCL. With its acquisitions of ALM, Law Journal Publishing, and LCL, the combined company now owned an assortment of early legal websites, including not only Counsel Connect, but also Law Journal Extra, another pioneering early site.
Faced with the need to harmonize these previously competing websites, ALM formed an internal committee to consider its online future. Thanks to both my relationship with LCL and the fact that I knew a thing or two about the web, I was retained as a consultant to that committee. The work of that committee ultimately led to the launch of Law.com, and it also led to my being hired by ALM as the editorial director of an initiative to build out a national news network to provide editorial coverage for Law.com.
That was a turning point in my career and, in a sense, I owe it all to Ted Turner’s decision not to let Steve Brill buy Court TV.
Thinking back over how legal media has evolved, it is fascinating to consider how so many of the threads run back, in part, through a 1996 boardroom in which a Southern broadcaster who had just sold his empire to Time Warner declined to sell one piece of it back to a Yale-trained lawyer from Queens.
Turner’s life was bigger than that footnote, obviously. But for those of us in this corner of journalism, it is a footnote worth noting.