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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Condé Nast Tries Turning the App Store Into a Newsstand: Will You Buy GQ for Your iPhone?

megan-fox-gq-october-2008-06-771162Condé Nast is still in layoff mode, but that hasn’t stopped the publisher from putting together an app worth writing about. It’s part of a digital magazine strategy that actually makes some sense.

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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Condé’s Cuts Come to Vogue

conde-nast-buildingAs expected, Condé Nast executives are swinging the layoff ax around the fabled magazine publisher. Today’s cuts are at Vogue, where I’m told at least six people have been let go from one of the company’s best-known titles. There will be more to come from the publisher, which shut down four magazines last week and is trying to bring down costs at its remaining titles by 25 percent.

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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Bloomberg Buys BusinessWeek For a Song, Plus Up to $5 Million

newstandWhat’s one of the biggest names in magazine publishing worth? These days, maybe $5 million.

That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek. Next question: How many of the magazine’s employees stay on once the deal closes later this year? BusinessWeek publisher Keith Fox can’t make any assurances. But he does call the deal “exciting.”

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Friday, October 9, 2009

Condé Cuts Continue: 15 at Digital, More to Come

conde-nast-buildingCondé Nast, which shuttered four magazines this week, said it won’t be cutting any more titles. But that won’t be the last of its cuts: The publisher is looking to cut costs by roughly 25 percent at all the magazines it publishes, likely leading to layoffs in many cases.

Today’s example doesn’t come from a magazine per se, but from the company’s digital group, which let go of “more than” 15 people, Expect more to come from Condé, and from other publishers, in coming weeks.

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Monday, October 5, 2009

Here Are the Condé Nast Cuts: Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet, Cookie Closing

conde-nast-buildingHere are the long-awaited cuts that Condé Nast has been mulling: Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, Gourmet and Cookie are all closing. More details via an internal memo from CEO Chuck Townsend.

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Friday, October 2, 2009

Publishers Like Time Inc.’s “Hulu for Magazines” Pitch. What Will Apple and Amazon Say?

genieTime Inc. has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet. Publishers like the idea. What will Apple and Amazon say?

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Gawker’s Nick Denton: I Paid Big Money for “McSteamy” Sex Tape

mcsteamyEarlier this year, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton announced that he was going to start paying for salacious clips, tips and other submissions, but that he hadn’t worked out the details. Looks like he figured it out: Denton says he paid the source who provided his blog network with the so-called “McSteamy” sex tapes that have earned him both a lot of traffic and a lawsuit.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Here’s Why McKinsey’s Coming to Condé Nast: The Coming Black September

conde-nast-buildingHere’s why Condé Nast is bringing in McKinsey & Co. for an emergency overhaul: The publisher’s lousy year isn’t getting any better. New numbers out today show that Condé’s September issues will be miserable across the board, with ad pages down anywhere from 17 percent to 47 percent. And that’s if you interpret the data favorably.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller Out. Here’s the Internal Memo.

jim-spanfellerForbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, who has run one of the Web’s biggest finance sites for the last nine years, is leaving the company at the end of the summer. No replacement has been named. Spanfeller’s departure comes amid a flurry of bad news for finance publications.

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Monday, July 6, 2009

Sarah Palin Is a Hit for Vanity Fair. But She’s No Jessica Simpson–Or Miley Cyrus!

sarah-palin-vfVanity Fair’s prescient decision to put all of Todd Purdum’s Sarah Palin profile on the Web last week paid off big on Friday. But it would have done even better had the story featured a slideshow with photographs of attractive young women.

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Monday, May 25, 2009

This Week’s New Yorker Cover, Brought to You by the iPhone

CV1_TNY_06_01_09.inddPublisher Condé Nast gets plenty of well-deserved criticism for its slow embrace of technology and the Web, but some of its individual titles do some interesting stuff. To wit: This video, which depicts how artist Jorge Columbo created this week’s cover art in an hour, using an iPhone and an app called Brushes.

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

AOL Lands Another Media Refugee: Portfolio.com’s Bercovici to DailyFinance

bercoviciI don’t usually write about writers landing jobs, but I did want to point out that Jeff Bercovici, last seen writing the Mixed Media blog for Portfolio.com, has landed at DailyFinance, a site run by Time Warner’s AOL. Why do I care? Because it’s yet another sign that AOL is continuing to hire experienced writers and reporters to bulk up its sites as other publishers are slimming down or shutting down. And because it’s a nice change of pace from layoff stories.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Portfolio Lives! Sort Of: Web Site Adopted by Condé Nast’s Corporate Cousin.

tales-from-the-cryptNever say never: Condé Nast, which is closing down its Portfolio business magazine, has decided not to turn off the lights at Portfolio.com. Instead, it is shifting control of the Web site–essentially, the Portfolio.com address and a couple years of archived content–over to American City Business Journals, its corporate cousin in the Advance Publications family.

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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Will Time Inc. Have to Cut Again?

ann-mooreTime Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today. But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors and Time Warner executives. Will she need to make a second round of cuts?

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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Why Portfolio’s Peers Shouldn’t Be Celebrating

newstandWhile the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but they’re all in lousy shape. And while we’re at it, let’s dispense with the story that Condé Nast burned $100 million or more on this one.

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About Peter

Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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