Ann Moore runs the world’s biggest magazine company, with titles ranging from the heavyweight Time and Fortune in the US to the that’s-more-like-it Loaded in the UK.

Her company, Time Inc, has already begun to feel the effects of a downturn, with advertising down 9 per cent in the second quarter. “My husband – he works for a private bank – tells me we are not technically in a recession, but that’s not the way I see it,” the 58-year-old American says.

Time Inc stands behind some of the great American names in publishing. Founded in 1922 by Henry Luce, the man who coined the phrase “the American century”, it is now the owner of IPC in the UK. The longevity of the business, and many of its titles – Luce founded Fortune soon after the Wall Street crash – allows Mrs Moore, who is in her 30th year at Time Inc, to argue that the business can weather whatever economic troubles lie ahead.

“Magazines are like an annuity,” she says. Certainly, circulations and advertising had been holding up, unlike US newspapers, helped by a push into video-heavy websites. “I never thought that journalists would make such good short-form storytellers,” she says, referring to their online efforts. Digital amounts to 15 per cent of group revenues, and grew at 73 per cent last year. Mrs Moore tartly likes to point out she runs a content company, rather than a magazine business.

Nevertheless, print magazine advertising is heading south this year, and digital growth in 2008 will miss the previous 53 per cent target. Mrs Moore acknowledges that “it will be tough to grow revenues” in 2009, but profits are another matter: “We aim to do better than stand still.” She is working on a new “two-year strategy” to get her company through the downturn.

Squeezing out details of the plan, though, proves tricky. “I don’t know if there will be layoffs,” she says. But there will be a sharing of resources across brands – a recent Time cover, “How Wall Street Sold Out America”, was written by two Fortune writers. “ Time was happy; it got two great writers for its cover – who was unhappy? Maybe Time’s five business writers, but they got to blog on the topic,” she says, outlining part of what is likely to be a comprehensive cost-saving plan.

IPC was acquired by Time Inc, itself part of Time Warner, in October 2001 for £1.1 billion. Home to NME and Country Life, IPC had faced question marks about its creativity in recent years – and there was talk that Time might be prepared to sell.

“Where did you hear that from? I know, wishful thinking from bankers hoping for a mandate,” she says, praising Sylvia Auton, the boss of IPC. “We are very pleased – three out of her last four launches have been hits – and that’s why we’ve given her more responsibility,” which, it turns out, is running Southern lifestyle titles out of Birmingham, Alabama.

That, though, is towards the limit of the Anglo-American synergies. Few of IPC’s titles, bar the women’s magazine InStyle, are published in both countries. Not much more crossover is planned, which makes sense, although Mrs Moore says that she is interested in bringing Decanter, the wine title, to the US. What does she think of Nuts, the breast-first title hardly designed to impress politically correct Americans. “It seems a little bit odd to me, but then I’m not in the target market,” she says, before adding judiciously: “It’s been a huge success.”

She thinks that Time Inc gives its corporate parent reliable income, even if revenues barely grew historically, arguing that “investors were too focused on trying to find double-digit growth”. Why shouldn’t Time Warner sell, though? “We’re a cash cow,” she says, pointing to Time Inc’s $907 million (£530 million) of profit last year, 13 per cent of Time Warner’s content businesses. Once again, she blames bankers for the speculation, and adds: “I hope that the lesson from this crisis is that we have less bankers, and return to the basics with more people who actually make things.”

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