Inside Intrigue at Conde Nast - Moving and Shaking Going On

Anna Wintour - One of the most
Powerful women in publishing

Conde Nast is a very influential publishing and mass media company with a lot of transformation going on. And tonight we are going to take a look at all the Conde Nast inside intrigue.

I believe this kind of analysis gives all aspiring writers, authors and indie publishers insight into the current day evolving industry that will empower them in their future endeavors. 

First, what is a mass media company (Conde Nast has grown into one over recent years)?

Secondly, a little history of Conde Nast: Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a mass media company headquartered in the Condé Nast Building in New York City. The company attracts more than 164 million consumers across its 20 print and digital media brands: Allure, Architectural Digest, Ars Technica, Bon Appétit, Brides, Condé Nast Traveler, Details, Epicurious, Glamour, Golf Digest, Golf World, GQ, Lucky, The New Yorker, Self, Teen Vogue,Vanity Fair, Vogue, W and Wired.

The company launched Condé Nast Entertainment in 2011 to develop film, television and digital video programming. The company also owns Fairchild Fashion Media (FFM) and its portfolio of comprehensive fashion journalism brands: Beauty Inc., Footwear News, M, Style.com and WWD.

The company was founded in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast and has been owned by the Newhouse family since 1959. Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. is the chairman and CEO of Advance Publications, Charles H. Townsend is its chief executive officer and Robert A. Sauerberg is its president.


And now this from Crain's New York Business by  MATTHEW FLAMM:

Anna Wintour consolidates her power at Condé Nast

An executive transition also gave President Bob Sauerberg new responsibilities.

  A long-expected executive transition took a step forward at Condé Nast on Wednesday with the announcement that President Bob Sauerberg would assume new responsibilities and Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour  will have no rival in her role as creative director.

Editorial Director Tom Wallace will leave the company. Though he is not being replaced, his job was considered redundant after Ms. Wintour was named creative director last year. John Bellando, a 15-year veteran who was both chief financial officer and chief operating officer, is also leaving the company, to be replaced by an executive from Time Inc.

Mr. Sauerberg, appointed president four years ago Wednesday, will "assume a leading role in all revenue generation activities," CEO Chuck Townsend wrote in a memo to staffers. That leading role will include overseeing Condé Nast Media Group, the division that handles the large corporate advertising sales that have traditionally produced 80% of the company's ad revenue.

Brought in following a brutal advertising recession, Mr. Sauerberg was charged with finding new sources of revenue, and already oversees consumer marketing, digital operations, business development, corporate administration and the new television arm Condé Nast Entertainment. He is also the heir apparent to Mr. Townsend, who is 69.

Mr. Townsend acknowledged the power shift in his memo, noting that "Bob and I have worked side by side as CEO and president to ensure we prepare the company to reach new heights." The changes announced Wednesday begin "this seamless transition."

As part of the transition, Mr. Sauerberg added to his corporate team, bringing in David Geithner from Time Inc. to replace the well-liked Mr. Bellando, who was considered "Chuck's right arm," according to a former Condé Nast executive. Mr. Geithner will report to Mr. Sauerberg, as will Lou Cona, president of Conde Nast Media Group.

Ms. Wintour's ascension was no surprise. 

"Anna really has more power than Bob and Chuck combined," said the former executive. "She's the person everyone sees as a visionary and as having a huge amount of influence inside and outside of the building."

Condé Nast—part of the privately held, Newhouse family-owned Advance Publications—still has its own way of doing things, with roles that are not always clearly defined. For instance, some publishers report to Mr. Townsend, while others report to Mr. Sauerberg. With Wednesday's announcement, they will all report to Mr. Sauerberg, according to a person familiar with the matter, although one publisher was unaware of any change.

"At a company like this it doesn't matter," he said. "You have very little oversight either way."

Correction: All Condé Nast publishers will report to President Bob Sauerberg. This fact was misstated in a previous version of this article, published online July 23, 2014.

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Resource article:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140723/MEDIA_ENTERTAINMENT/140729938/anna-wintour-consolidates-her-power-at-condeacute-nast

The Association of Magazine Media

The main (and probably the oldest - est. 1919) professional association for magazine publishers is the Magazine Publishers of American (MPA).

Well, they have just changed their name to The Association of Magazine Media...which they still abbreviate or accronym as MPA?!

Why don't they just use AMM for Association of Magazine Media?

The reasoning for the new name, they say, is to get away from the words "print" and "publishing" which they figure are dead to the younger generation.

What a cluster muck of thinking! For one, they are still publishers regardless of the media format and secondly, print is not going away (changing yes, but not dying); on the contrary new print tech is here and more surprises are coming in print media.

This report from Reuters by Robert MacMillan:

They’ll always be the Magazine Publishers of America to me

The Magazine Publishers of America said on Friday that it is renaming itself the MPA — The Association of Magazine Media. The notable difference is the omission of the word publishers. Why?

“MPA is underscoring the fact that magazine media content engages consumers globally across multiple platforms, including websites, tablets, smartphones, books, live events and more.”

“More” presumably means “printed magazines,” but nobody in media is all that hot on associating themselves with words like “publish” and “print” because to young people (or young “consumers” in the parlance that people use when their sole desire is to make money from you) and investors those words smell like death.

When magazine publishers like Conde Nast and newspaper publishers like Advance Publications (like Conde Nast, owned by the Newhouses) have been forced to cut hundreds if not thousands of jobs and stop publishing some of their products, it doesn’t do much good in the public relations department to accentuate the part of your business that is fading, even if it still produces 80 to 90 percent of your revenue. Fortunately, Time Inc CEO and incoming MPA Chairman Jack Griffin manages to refer in passing to “print” one time in the press release quote.

Read more http://alturl.com/d6zrd

Publisher Condé Nast Moving to Ground Zero WTC ?

The proposed new World Trade Center development plan started off with a bang, lost popularity and recently resurged in the "let's Do" popularity realm (due to the bubblings of economic recovery, no doubt).

Could the WTC plan now be in vogue again because of the giant publisher of Vogue magazine (among many others) wanting up to one million SF in the new facility? You betcha! The magazine biz can't be hurting that much, you reckon?

This was reported in Crain's New York Business by James Comtois:

In the span of about a month, the World Trade Center development has gone from unpopular to potentially Vogue.

After a number of real estate developers began to bid for a minority stake in the once disfavored project, The New York Times is reporting that publishing giant Condé Nast has been talking with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey about moving to 1 World Trade Center.

In a move that could be a potential game-changer, the publisher may take up as much as 1 million square feet in the planned office tower when it is complete, the Times said.

Currently, the only tenants for the tower-in-development are government offices and a Chinese real estate company. If the publisher decides to ink a deal, it could rebrand the project that up until recently, few tenants wanted to touch.

Due to its cache, Condé Nast—which publishes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue—could rebrand the financial district, much in the same way that its 1999 move into 4 Times Square was seen to have helped rebrand the midtown area as resurgent.

In 2007, the publisher was part of a bid for the development rights over the West Side rail yards by the developer Douglas Durst, whose family owns 4 Times Square.

Representatives from Condé Nast and the Port Authority declined to comment.

Conde Nast, Magazine Publishing Empire, Gets Hacked & Goes To Court

Conde Nast, publisher of established magazines covering fashion, technology, food, and travel, including The New Yorker, Vogue, Glamour, GQ and Wired, has been hacked and had images and future editorial content stolen and published on another publisher's website!

More intrigue and drama in the publishing world!

This from Matthew Lynch of WWD Media:

CONDE NAST SPRINGS A LEAK: As if the year-end newsstand competition weren’t enough, Condé Nast Publications said in court documents Thursday that GQ’s December issue had to contend with a hacker who leaked a large swath of its editorial content before the magazine even hit shelves. In a copyright lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the publisher said an unauthorized Web user, which it knows only by his or her Internet protocol address, had accessed the company’s networks in September and copied more than 1,100 files. In November, the anonymous author of the blog FashionZag posted some of the lifted content, including GQ’s five alternate December covers, using a third-party photo-hosting site. Condé Nast’s legal team sent a takedown request to the photo host, which complied. Two days later, however, the publisher said the blog used a different photo service to repost the images along with much of the issue’s “still as yet unpublished editorial ‘well.’”

Lawyers wrote that the subsequent posting was “willfully done by defendants to thumb their noses at Condé Nast…” The company said the second post enabled numerous third parties such as Twitter users and other bloggers to spread the content across the Internet.

According to the suit, the original hacker also copied pages from the December issues of Vogue, Teen Vogue and Lucky. The company said it believes it will be able to discover his or her identity through the course of the suit. It is seeking an injunction, attorney’s fees and unspecified damages from up to five anonymous defendants. A visit to FashionZag Friday revealed the five GQ cover shots were still up, as was a Leighton Meester spread from the issue and Lady Gaga’s December Vogue shoot, though some of the other editorial material described in the suit was gone.