What’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.”
Here 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.
Maybe this is why Comcast rushed to knock down a story that said it bought NBC Universal from GE: It knew Wall Street would hate the idea.
Not included in the long list of investors betting $100 million on Twitter today: Union Square Ventures, one of the messaging service’s most prominent backers. What happened? Best guess: The $1 billion valuation priced the early investor out.
Does the economic turmoil have you pinching pennies and clipping coupons? Then the newest product from the Financial Times isn’t for you: The daily’s new quarterly magazine is aimed at people worth more than $1.6 million.
Forbes.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.
Looking for lots of specifics about the $200 million at $10 billion valuation deal that Facebook and Digital Sky Technologies just announced? Then you have come to the wrong conference call, my friend. But for what it’s worth, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did sound fairly upbeat and confident during his chat with reporters Tuesday morning–the way you’d expect someone who just cashed a check for a couple hundred million to sound.
The big picture: Even though Facebook’s official valuation has slid from $15 billion (November 2007, when Microsoft invested) to $10 billion, Zuckerberg is OK with that, arguing that 1) that deal was done at the peak of the market, and 2) it was never really a financial deal, but a way for Microsoft to partner up with Facebook.
I 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.
Never 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.
While 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.
User-generated news aggregators like Reddit are notoriously difficult sites to pitch to advertisers, but Condé Nast may have figured out how to do it. If it works, it could be promising news for Digg, which has a bigger audience but the same problems.
A rare bit of good news for the embattled music label CEO: A New York court says he doesn’t owe former Simon & Schuster boss Richard Snyder for helping him figure out how to buy Warner Music a few years ago.
How serious is media investment group Quadrangle about keeping its annual Foursquare conference private? Serious enough that the only account I’ve seen of it stayed live on the Web for just a few hours yesterday. Portfolio.com media blogger Jeff Bercovici posted a short item about one of the panels yesterday afternoon; later that evening, the story had disappeared.
Notes from Quadrangle’s Foursquare hush-hush media and tech conference: CBS anchor Katie Couric says she consulted former senator Sam Nunn and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas before her now-famous interrogation of the VP candidate.
Under normal circumstances, if the CEOs of big companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Comcast speak in front of an audience of bigwigs, it’s news. But you’re unlikely to hear what John Chambers, Steve Ballmer and Brian Roberts say today and tomorrow at Quadrangle’s Foursquare conference–no press allowed. Unless…
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. Read more »
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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