Conde Nast

Over the next week or two, the January issues of monthly magazines will start hitting newsstands—or perhaps “lightly floating onto newstands like little snowflakes” would be a better way of putting it.

“A lot of people are really, really down in the dumps about what January looks like,” said Jay Lauf, the publisher of the recently revamped Atlantic.

Layoffs, hiring freezes and canceled Christmas parties have cast a general chill over the magazine world. But with budget season finally wrapped up, it looked like the industry could finally take a much-needed breather right before the New Year.

Then suddenly more bad news emerged from the business side: bleaker-than-usual ad-page numbers for January.  read more »

"There’s no truth to it," said Si Newhouse in a statement sent through a spokeswoman to wsj.com today, regarding the rumors that Anna Wintour is on the verge of being replaced by Carine Roitfeld as editor of Vogue. "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard."

Gawker wrote in an item earlier today—filed under the header "Rumormonger"—that Mr. Newhouse left for France early to seal a deal with Ms. Roitfeld.

So what does it mean that Mr. Newhouse released this statement? It means it's probably not going to happen all that soon! Mr. Newhouse very rarely delivers statements, even through his spokeswoman Maurie Perl, so the fact that he felt compelled (from Europe!) to take care of this is a rather strong vote of confidence for Ms. Wintour.

At least for the time being.

One person who won't stick around at portfolio.com is its editor, and ex-New York Post business editor, Dan Colarusso.

"I'm going to be staying through January 31st to help a newly appointed Managing Editor to take over the site," Mr. Colarusso told Media Mob in an interview.

Portfolio.com was recently gutted amid larger cuts at the magazine, and its staff of 45 has been whittled down to only a handful. Remaining players include Market Movers blogger Felix Salmon and Mixed Media blogger Jeff Bercovici.

But Mr. Colarusso, who was offered a job to stay, won't be hanging around the new skeleton site.  read more »

Early last week, the survival of several Condé Nast titles was in doubt.

According to sources familiar with the situation, when Condé Nast executives walked into a weekly meeting last Monday, October 27th at their headquarters at 4 Times Square, it was not clear whether chairman Si Newhouse and C.E.O. Chuck Townsend would decide to scale back several titles, or to fold them entirely.

Two magazines, Portfolio and Men’s Vogue, were specifically in trouble. Both magazines are newer titles for the company—18-months- and 3-years-old respectively—and have had difficulty drawing instant results, particularly in an ad climate that Condé Nast executive director Tom Wallace told the Portfolio staff later was the worst he had ever seen.  read more »

And bad news continues to leak out of 4 Times Square.

Media Mob has learned that Portfolio is cutting roughly 20 percent of its staff, and the monthly will now publish only 10 times a year.

Portfolio.com, the stand-alone Web site that has been unique for its original content and its large staff, will be severely scaled back; the Web site and whichever remaining staffers it has will merge with other Condé Nast Web properties. The ad sales work for the Web site will be done by Wired Digital.

Joanne Lipman will remain the editor in chief of the magazine.

David Carey, a group president at Condé Nast who oversees Portfolio, said that the 18-month-old magazine was launched "when we were expecting a much more robust ad climate.  read more »

A Condé Nast spokeswoman writes in an e-mail, "Men's Vogue will be absorbed into Vogue and published in the spring and fall, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and C.E.O of Condé Nast Publications. It will continue to be edited by Jay Fielden."

Earlier today, we reported that Condé Nast execs have been figuring out what to do with Men's Vogue at a time when the entire company is going through cutbacks. They were considering folding it, but decided to eliminate its staff and reduce its publishing schedule from 10 issues a year to two issues a year.

A source at Condé Nast said the only reason it exists in any form is "nothing more than for Anna to save face."

Call it the Five Percent Plan.

The Observer has learned that all Condé Nast publishers and editors have been told they have to cut their staffs by 5 percent and their budgets by 5 percent within weeks, according to five Condé Nast sources.

It will affect every title, including the company's most successful: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Glamour and down the line.

The plan is not just a 5 percent overall spending reduction but rather two distinct 5 percent cuts for each title, guaranteeing that titles cannot meet the goal without cutting staff.

First, each book will have to cut 5 percent of its payroll.  read more »

In addition to announcing a hiring chill, Condé Nast C.E.O. Chuck Townsend has informed his publishers that their annual retreat will not be in Florida ths year as originally planned; it'll be in New York instead.

WWD reports:

This year’s meeting was scheduled to be at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla. According to one insider, executives were sent a save the date about the Florida meeting in July.

On Tuesday morning, Condé Nast top brass mentioned to executives that the meeting would be moved, and by Friday morning, an events staffer sent a short e-mail to publishers informing them the meeting will be held Jan. 26 and 27 in New York, with a dinner to be held on the 26th.

Also: Hearst canceled its Christmas party.

Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend informed a group of his publishers yesterday morning that if their magazines can avoid hiring someone, they should.

"If you have an open position on your team, they're going to make you stand on your head until you're blue in the face before you fill it," said one attendee at the meeting.

Mr. Townsend gathered publishers for a quarterly breakfast meeting on the fourth floor at 4 Times Square. It lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Scrambled eggs, potatoes and fruit were served.

The language from Mr. Townsend wasn't entirely clear, but with more bad news released yesterday about ad revenues in the industry, Mr. Townsend and Si Newhouse have notified the publishers of each Condé Nast book to say that it's time to reevaluate things on both the editorial and business sides before swinging into 2009.

It's not quite a hiring freeze! It's a hiring chill of sorts.

"My interpretation of it is that it's not cast in stone or that the doors are locked," said the source. "But it's a request that however you're running your business now, you should continue to do that for the foreseeable future."

The 64-year-old Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend was married this weekend on his yacht, "Current Issue," in Rhode Island.

His new wife, 42-year-old Jill Roosa, used to be the executive director of a charity group. Page Six reported that it was "a small wedding just for family." Here's the Times' wedding announcement.

Leon Neyfakh reads David Carr's The Night of the Gun and concludes that the book "turns the traditional memoir on its head, assuming as it does that its author knows nothing about his own life and must research it as though it were someone else’s. The book practically interrogates itself, questioning its own right to exist even as Mr. Carr vigilantly gathers string on the dark and druggy life he led into his 30s."

Josh Benson and Felix Gillette examine, "The McCain campaign’s response to the quantifiable imbalance in volume-of-coverage—a function, depending on whom you ask, of the fact that the press loves the Barack Obama story or that John McCain is the Republican nominee for president—has been a petulant cry of foul for the kind of infraction gentlemen are supposed to ignore.  read more »

At first glance, the Web sites elasticwaist.com, productfiend.com and dailybedpost.com look like garden-variety blogs created by average civilians. There’s little clutter, no ads, links to other sites with similar post-feminist themes (dieting, skin care and sex, respectively) and sporadically updated content.

But upon closer inspection, there’s something suspiciously … slick about the layout of all three, isn’t there? Aha! Down the left-hand side of each loom the logos of Glamour, Allure and Self, rendered in varying shades of pink. And then in size 7.5 Veranda font, tucked away at the bottom of the page, is the telltale line: “Copyright © 2007 Condé Nast Publications.  read more »

The New York Post's Keith J. Kelly speculates aloud on what it means for a Conde Nast magazine to be moved from the headquarters at 4 Times Square to 485 Lexington Avenue, where the publishing empire has auxilary office space:

Last year, House & Garden was shut down just a year after moving its offices into that building. This week it was Golf for Women.

"If any magazine gets moved into here, it probably means they are getting ready to shut down," said one source.

One more title and it's an official trend!

Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast exec who was the inspiration for Sex and the City's Mr. Big, has gotten a bit of press this past week. There's an item in WWD's Memo Pad today in which he surveys the red-carpet crowd at last week's movie Sex and the City premiere.  read more »

Tom Florio, the publisher of the Vogue titles at Conde Nast, has picked up a new hobby. Today's Intelligencer in New York reports that Mr. Florio has a thing for ... gondola racing!  read more »

It's on the record now.

Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace gave the company's loudest and most forceful public support for Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio. In a story in today's Women's Wear Daily written by Stephanie Smith, Wallace says the following: that the company "love[s]" Joanne Lipman; that she's an "ingenious" editor; that she's absolutely safe in her job; that the company is "extremely pleased" with the magazine.  read more »

Conde Nast was one of the tangential losers in the West Side rail yards bidding. The magazine publishing giant was the anchor tenant for the Durst-Vornado bid, and that bid, of course, lost yesterday to Tishman Speyer's.

But! John Koblin, at our brother blog Media Mob, reports that Conde Nast C.O.O. John Bellando sent out an internal memo this morning telling employees that the company was still looking to build a new tower--somewhere--by 2016.

From the memo:  read more »

Si Newhouse's plan for a new skyscraper on the far West Side with Douglas Durst is dead in the water, but is there something else out there?

Conde Nast C.O.O. John Bellando sent out an internal email this morning reassuring employees that all hope isn't lost. At least for a new skyscraper somewhere. Here's the memo:  read more »

Steven Florio, former C.E.O. and president of Conde Nast, died yesterday after a heart attack. He was 58.

Vogue editor Anna Wintour described the Conde Nast landscape under Florio's reign like this to WWD: "It was a smaller world. It was much less involved in the Internet. The company wasn't as large as it is now, and he ran it based on relationships he had. It was more like an old boys' network."  read more »

The Observer's John Koblin, on our sister blog The Media Mob, breaks the news this morning that House & Garden magazine will fold after its December issue hits stands.

Conde Nast, the magazine's publisher, just doesn't see money in the title any more.

We can't help but wonder whether the slumping national housing market--and all the attendant industries that relied upon it, from landscaping to contracting to brokering--had something to do with the magazine's folding.

Conde Nast's House & Garden has folded.

"We have announced this morning that with the December issue we will cease publication," said Maurie Perl, spokeswoman for Conde Nast to The Observer this morning.

“Our investment in House & Garden throughout the years has been substantial and we no longer believe it is a viable business investment for the company," said Charles Townsend, President & CEO of Condé Nast in a statement.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has joined Stephen Ross's Related Companies in its bid for the Hudson Yards project, a source familiar with the bid said.

If Stephen Ross' Related won the bid to develop on the far West Side, News Corp. would move its headquarters from its Sixth Avenue tower and into a new tower in Hudson Yards, the source said. Last week, The Observer reported that Conde Nast would leave 4 Times Square for a new, 1.5-million-square-foot tower if Douglas Durst and Vornado won a bid; and it was also reported that Morgan Stanley had teamed up with Tishman Speyer.  read more »

When Condé Nast moved its headquarters from Madison Avenue to 42nd Street in 1999, it brought instant credibility to the Times Square office market. Now, only eight years later, Condé Nast is again making plans to relocate its headquarters to another untested area for big-name Manhattan office tenants.

Condé Nast intends to move out of its home at 4 Times Square and into an entirely new tower in Hudson Yards on the far West Side by 2015, developer Douglas Durst told The Observer this week. The new tower, as sketched out as part of a proposal by the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust for the Hudson Yards development site, would be exclusively for Condé Nast and would be built to 1.5 million square feet.

Mr. Durst, the developer of 4 Times Square, said that Condé Nast would consolidate its offices in the new tower and would move out of the roughly 700,000 square feet it currently occupies in 4 Times Square. The Condé Nast lease there ends in 2018, but Mr. Durst said a deal would be negotiated to let the publisher break the lease by 2015.  read more »

Conde Nast intends to move out of its home at 4 Times Square and move into an entirely new tower in Hudson Yards on the far West Side by 2015, said developer Douglas Durst.

The new tower, as sketched out by a proposal for the Hudson Yards development site by the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust, would be exclusively for Conde Nast and would be built to 1.5 million square feet.

Mr. Durst told The Observer this afternoon that Conde Nast would consolidate its offices in the new tower and would move out of the roughly 700,000 square feet that it currently occupies at Mr. Durst’s 4 Times Square. The Conde Nast lease at 4 Times Square ends in 2018, but Mr. Durst said a deal would be negotiated to let them break the lease by 2015.

This is all under the condition that the Durst Organization and Vornado win the bid to develop the Hudson Yards site. Bids are due Oct. 11 to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the yards' owner, and other companies preparing proposals include The Related Companies, Brookfield Properties and Tishman Speyer.

The news that Conde Nast wants to build a new tower was reported by Women's Wear Daily this morning. (The New York Times also reported this morning that Morgan Stanley has teamed with Tishman Speyer on a proposal to build a new headquarters on the yards.)

Mr. Durst told The Observer that having Conde Nast already secured as an anchor tenant for one of its towers can only help the position of its bid with Vornado.

“We think it’s a tremendous advantage,” he said. “We are very excited about it. We hope it’ll help our bid. We think the team we put together has put us in an excellent position.”

A call to a Conde Nast spokeswoman was not immediately returned.