It’s a return to battle for two veterans of the catty and combative fashion news wars.
Former Fairchild boss Michael Coady and ex-InStyle editor Charla Lawhon are joining forces — with a chance to twist the tails of their respective former employers — to launch fashionetc.com, an ad-supported site focusing on fashion.
“We saw a great opportunity for a fashion/beauty Web site,” Coady said. “There are several out there and certainly a lot of blogs, but no one is in a dominant position. The fashion market is just starting to move swiftly to the Web and the next two to three years will see a shakeout.”
Ad-supported Web sites are a long shot, even in the age of tablets, but this one has at least one key factor in its favor: Jimmy Finkelstein, owner of The Hill and a major mover behind The Hollywood Reporter, is its key backer.
The venture is separate and apart from Finkelstein’s investment in Prometheus Global Media, the company that teamed up with Guggenheim Partners in late 2009 to take over Adweek, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter from Nielsen Business Media.
Finkelstein is expected to pump several million into the newest venture, but he declined to comment on specifics other than to say he’s planning to make a “substantial investment.”
Fashionistas recognize Coady, the respected and at times feared CEO of Fairchild Publications.
S.I. Newhouse, Jr., the chairman of Advance Publications and Condé Nast, made it clear shortly after his $650 million acquisition of Fairchild in 1999 that he was in no mood to tolerate a rival power base at the publisher of W and Women’s Wear Daily — and Coady was soon gone into semi-retirement in California.
Coady returned to New York City about a year ago and reached out to Finkelstein, who was exploring new ventures.
Lawhon was bumped upstairs at Time Inc. as a “group editor” in 2008, when Ariel Foxman was tapped as the top editor on the mag, and she left the company a year later.
fashionetc.com went live on Monday with a combination of its own original reporting and aggregation from other fashion sites.
“We’re looking to become the largest fashion site in terms of visitors, and we’re looking to get there fairly quickly,” said Coady.
He said sites such as Glamour.com at Condé Nast draw just over 1 million unique visitors, while WWD.com — which had a virtually non-existent Web presence when he left more than a decade ago — is still pulling in only 400,000-plus unique visitors a month.
In contrast, Glam Media routinely pulls in 80 million unique visitors a month, far and away the largest, but Coady says WWD.com doesn’t look on it as a direct rival.
“Glam Media is a network of sites,” Coady says. “It’s the 800-pound gorilla. It’s the Wal-Mart of the fashion world. We’re not trying to outdistance them nor do we want to.”
Included in the small elite editorial strike force that editor-in-chief Lawhon put together for the launch is news editor Susannah Cahn, formerly news editor of AOL Stylist, and fashion director Amina Akhtar, previously fashion editor of New York magazine’s The Cut.
Coady still has brand name recognition in the fashion world.
“I still know a lot of people,” he said. “Michael Gould is still CEO of Bloomingdale’s, Terry Lundgren is still CEO of Macy’s and Ron Frasch is still President of Saks. Ditto for many of the fashion and beauty companies.”
Gina Sanders, the fourth top executive at Fairchild in the 11 years since Coady’s departure, didn’t return a call seeking comment on the fledgling rival.
Bad news
The bubble of post-bankruptcy euphoria has burst at American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, Star, Men’s Fitness and Muscle & Fitness.
President David Pecker, who delivered an upbeat speech to all employees after emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at the end of December, has told all 400 employees that they must take a three-day unpaid furlough before the end of the current fiscal quarter on March 31.
“We are all being furloughed, from David to the mailroom,” acknowledged spokeswoman Sa mantha Trenk. “It’s a one- shot deal affecting every single person in the company.”
Insiders were also up in arms this week when Chief Financial Officer Christopher Poli meni pulled into the em ployee parking lot in a brand new silver Corvette.
And insiders also noticed some language buried deep in the bankruptcy filing papers that allowed for an unspecified number of insiders to be rewarded with bonuses totaling $2.5 million for steering the company through bankruptcy.
Trenk said the two events — the furlough and the bonus to top people — were “completely unrelated.” kkelly@nypost.com