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But what was the feeling over in the editorial halls of Time's magazines? After all, Time Warner was the first of the "old media" companies to take a serious stab at colonizing the Web with its unsuccessful (and largely mismanaged) supersite, Pathfinder. One of its most respected veterans, Don Logan, had famously declared the Internet "a black hole." Now the most dominant force in that hole was essentially buying a majority interest in Time Warner. Was there a sense of loss, of failure among the company's old-school journalists?

"Everyone has their calculators on their desks," said one People staffer I talked with, alluding to the surge in TW's stock price that morning. Employees at the company are famously well-remunerated with many of the perks coming in the form of stock. Everyone gets a 401K, for example, and after a year the company provides matching funds in stock. And executives, especially those with seniority, have stock options as well. "The joke was that this was the first time people have come in on a Monday morning with a big smile on their face."

Also Today The Net on AOL's Time Warner deal Will the new colossus change the Internet for better or worse? By Janelle Brown, Damien Cave and Lydia Lee AOL and Time Warner's marriage of insecurity Fear drove the two companies into bed with each other. Now it's our turn to be afraid. By Scott Rosenberg

"Everybody who's vested is too busy lighting cigars and tipping hookers to comment," said an editor at Sports Illustrated. (He was kidding, of course. Smoking is strictly prohibited there.)

Those who agreed to speak on the record were more measured in their praise of the deal and its implications for TW. "Everybody I've spoken to is absolutely thrilled by this," said Josh Quittner, technology columnist for Time magazine. "I've been searching for a downside over here and have yet to find one."

As a veteran of both the Internet and Time Warner, Quittner is uniquely qualified to talk about the company's history with the Web and what sort of closure a merger with AOL brings. Since the mid-'90s and the launch of Pathfinder (where Quittner's Netly News channel debuted) there has been talk of Time buying an ISP or even becoming one -- and AOL was one of its early partners. But as Ted Turner noted in Monday's press conference, "It's not so easy to go out and re-create an AOL," and Quittner (who also edits the Time Digital supplement) points to the company's merging with CNN as a milestone in Time's cultural history.

"When CNN and Turner joined the Time Warner family it was also the thing that was discussed: how much money would it cost to build a CNN? And that's how mega media companies think, so the cost of actually going out and doing this thing would be insane."

And it wasn't just CNN's news-gathering ability that Time Warner admired. After bad-mouthing the whole notion of "synergy" -- the old TW shorthand for bringing their brands and ventures together -- a cable advertising executive said, "One of the only companies that has taken synergy to a new level is Turner and then TW. The single most important thread throughout Turner for years was, How can we all make money on a deal? They were the masters at packaging cable properties, arena signage, licensing of characters, etc."

"Time Warner used to be an example of how synergy does not work," continues Quittner. The merger with Warner's music properties, for example, was not always a harmonious one: The language of the music business and the language of journalism did not compute. "Now you've got AOL so you've got journalism and entertainment and new media and the question is, Will that be the missing piece, the synergy that was missing? This could be the lingua franca, the denominator that allows everybody else to function more smoothly and provides everyone with the reach they're so desperate for."

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