When employees of Time Inc. trundled into a corporate auditorium on Monday, the atmosphere was funereal.
The night before, many of them had been stunned by the news that the venerable publisher of Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and People had agreed to sell itself to the Meredith Corporation in a $2.8 billion deal made possible by an equity infusion from Koch Industries, the sprawling conglomerate run by Charles G. and David H. Koch.
The announcement of the sale had in some ways ended years of dread inside Time Inc. The company had been floundering since it was spun off from Time Warner