Here’s what you need to know about the shake ups going on inside Conde Nast: Vanity Fair will continue to run mindless celebrity cover stories and The New Yorker will continue to not select our caption contest entries.
Oh, and publishers are changing! Basically, Chuck Townsend is clearing out anyone who had an allegiance to the just-deceased Steve Florio. Golf Digest and Fairchild Fashion Group chief Mitchell Fox and Lucky publisher Sandy Golinkin are out. Fox will be replaced by Cond?? Nast Portfolio publisher David Carey; Golinkin will be replaced by Teen Vogue publisher Gina Sanders, who also happens to share a bed with Steve Newhouse (who should one day be running Si’s empire). Meanwhile, New Yorker publisher Lou Cona is heading upstairs to run with Richard “Mad Dog” Beckman’s pack, replacing Amy Churgin.
Fashionable toddlers, however, will continue to adorn the cover of Cookie. The more things change …
MAN DOWN Former Conde Nast chief Steve Florio died yesterday from complications following a heart attack over Thanksgiving. He was 58. [MW]
• ABC pays News Corp. $1m kill fee for O.J. Simpson interview that Barbara Walters passed on, giving Judith Regan some much needed buffer room for that little financial fiasco.
• IvyGate fosters healthy father-son relationships: The blog’s founder and his Boston Globe-columnist father share stories.
• Maer Roshan was just begging to be called out on his latest ego trip.
• Steve Florio leaves his Conde Nast executive suite for the Conde Nast cafeteria. Or something like that.
• Bidders for Tribune’s assets aren’t offering enough cash, forcing the company to take some time to think of clever ponzi schemes to make up the rest.
• With the city’s most famous party crasher in attendance, it’s nice to see Jon Friedman get the headlining love.
• If you ask Internet entrepreneuers what they’d do if they had their own newspaper, of course they’re going to say something about going digital.
• Portfolio poaching always requires a mention.
• Jack Shafer’s experiment in Digg popularity fails. Miserably. [Slate]
• The new MSNBC has no women in primetime, but new chief Dan Abrams won’t have you claiming there’s anything sexist going on. [Philadephia Inquirer]
• When he’s done terrorizing the halls for 4 Times Square, Steve Florio may take up a permanent position terrorizing NYU kids. [WWD]
• Clay Aiken refuses to hide in the shadows. [MollyGood]
• In her “refresh[ing]” of Better Homes & Gardens, Gayle Butler will make articles shorter and include more photos. You know, to attract the teen readers. [Demoines Register]
• Racist memorabilia are now collectors’ items, so long as the purpose is to reclaim your history. [NYT]
• Unlike the waterfront, Brooklyn’s magazine scene wasn’t worth investing in. [NY Sun]
That high-brow arts title from Conde Nast might just yet appear, despite the door supposedly closing on former editorial director James Truman’s vision.
Truman, who took off for Spain after leaving the company in January, took a lunch with chairman Si Newhouse last month, which confirms our fears: Nobody ever really “leaves” 4 Times Square. Si wants to know if James is interested in resuming development of the title.
Meanwhile, Conde Nast is putting all its efforts into getting its business title off the ground, so it might be a couple years before Truman’s Sotheby’s catalog appears on newsstands.
• Lindsay Lohan spent a Hamptons weekend rolling around with Butter co-owner (do their numbers ever slow?) Richie Akiva, who used to date Carmen Kass and was tied to Mary-Kate Olsen. If they weren’t blowing each other, what else could they be blowing?
• A “well-dressed woman in a black Town Car” has been seen around town buying up all copies of the latest issue of Vanity Fair, but with Jennifer Aniston’s interview and photos already leaked, rumor mongers are pointing to the likelihood of interested society gatekeepers preventing Dominick Dunne’s piece of Lily Safra reaching their inner circle.
• Us Weekly’s west coast editor Ken Baker is taking pot shots at Star’s Bonnie Fuller and embroiled People’s Todd Gold in his new novel, Hollywood Hussein.
• Scarlett Johansson ain’t having any of The Island producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald’s blame game. She’s firing back at the producing couple, who spent the weeks leading up to the film’s release on holiday in Italy.
• Usher is looking to follow in the footsteps of Jay-Z and Sean Combs, enlisting his industry know-how for some boardroom game play. He’s approached Warner Music’s Steve Stoute with his plans to to play a “more executive role” rather than continuing to pump out hit records. Though a Jossip spy spotted him dining very alone at Bed this weekend, so perhaps nobody’s taken him up on a meeting just yet.
• What better locale to gab on the tony Plum TV than aboard your yacht? That’s how Conde Nast’s Steve Florio did it while telling the network’s Jonathan Tisch how he cracked down on corporate dalliances.
We already told you last month about Steve Florio’s dead book deal, thanks to the overzealous publicity push by his publisher Crown (a Random House imprint).
While Lloyd Grove heard the book deal was “dead, dead, dead,” the latest update merely puts Florio’s business book-slash-Conde Nast tell all on hold.
But good public-relations students know that it is the grist that counts, which is why the Crown publicists hyped Ron [Galotti, fired GQ publisher] v. Steve, and the Women’s Wear Daily (June 21, 2005)/New York Times (June 22) write-ups ensued. “It convinced me not to do the book right now,” says Florio. “I will not do anything that will compromise my friends and colleagues.”
Well, that pretty much means the book is “dead, dead, dead.” That’s a galley not worth flipping through.