ALPHA Media has shut down the print edition of music magazine Blender, and axed about 30 people in the whole company, including highly regarded co-CEO Glenn Rosenbloom and Maxim Editorial Director Jim Kaminsky.
Emerging from the latest bloodbath is Joe Levy, who was the editor of Blender and will become editor-in-chief of Maxim, and Jay Woodruff, who was the editor-in-chief of Maxim Digital and will become the chief content officer of Maxim. Woodruff and Levy are expected to oversee the combined Maxim editorial team.
“I wish everyone working at the magazine the best,” said Kaminsky when reached yesterday. “We just put together a redesign of the front of the book.”
Alpha Media was formed when Quadrangle Media, headed by Steven Rattner and Peter Ezersky, bought Maxim, Blender and Stuff from Felix Dennis in August 2007 for about $245 million.
Kent Brownridge, the former No. 2 executive at Wenner Media, was brought into Quadrangle as the new CEO and immediately shut down Stuff, ousted many of the longtime editors and publishers and restaffed with his own people.
But things did not go according to plan. By the fall of 2008, Quadrangle had defaulted on loans when the company’s profit dropped from $28 million in 2007 to under $8 million last year. Cerberus Capital Management, which led the banking group that loaned Quadrangle $125 million to complete the deal, called for Quadrangle to put in more cash to bring the company’s cash flow in line with the loan requirements.
Rattner and Ezersky balked, and as the financial crunch worsened, Brownridge was ousted and Rosenbloom and Steven Duggan were installed as co-CEOs.
Now, Duggan remains.
“I worked very closely with Steve Duggan on creating and implementing the new structure,” Rosenbloom said. “Now it’s time to look for new opportunities.”
Most observers think more cutbacks are inevitable.
On paper, Quadrangle remains in control of the board, but as part of restructuring talks, Cerberus is expected to swap its debt for equity, and become the new owner. There has been tense wrangling over just how to make that happen and how much debt to assign a newly formed corporation, sources said.
“The company has been twisting in the wind for four or five months,” said one.
In the midst of all this, Rattner abruptly resigned from Quadrangle, where its media holdings were winding down, to serve as a special adviser on the auto industry to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, heading a task force guiding the White House on how to restructure the US auto industry.
Oddly, having played hardball with Cerberus after defaulting on the loan at Alpha Media, Rattner’s now in a position to influence the outcome of one of Cerberus’ investments, Chrysler Corp.
Mad Dog
Now that Richard “Mad Dog” Beckman is out of the Condé Nast tower in Times Square, insiders are wondering how his limousine-management style will fit in at the more newspaper-oriented Fairchild Fashion Group over at 750 Third Ave.
While Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend was issuing statements of praise for Beckman, most industry observers were pegging Beckman’s new job as a demotion.
He has gone from Condé Nast ad king, president of the Condé Nast Media Group, where he presided over 80 percent of the ad revenues in a $2 billion-revenue company, to heading a division with no glossy magazines and $75 million in annual revenue.
Indeed, all of Fairchild’s glitzy magazines — Details, W, and Cookie — were stripped out of the division, leaving behind only a few trade newspapers — Women’s Wear Daily, DNR and Footwear News. Beckman’s annual package, estimated at $2 million or more a year, was on par with those of CEOs of major publishing companies.
He is known as a hard-charging executive with a string of accomplishments. Virtually every magazine on which he served as publisher has ended up with double-digit ad increases and appearances on various industry hot lists.
Nevertheless, sources say he has long felt underappreciated for his role as Condé Nast’s chief ad-revenue rainmaker.
Nowadays, the thing to watch, one source said, will be the relationship between Townsend and Beckman.
Sources said that Beckman’s greatest pleasure as presi dent of Condé Nast Media Group was running the Fashion Rocks at Radio City event, where he got to serve as emcee to major music acts and negotiate TV deals for the annual special on CBS.
But that disappeared when Fashion Rocks and its West Coast counterpart, Movie Rocks, were canceled, and his ad-sales staff was chopped by 20 percent in a few months.
The speculation is that Beckman could go two ways: He’ll either get mad and channel it into a sweeping shakeup at a rejuvenated Fairchild — or he’ll get mad and look for his own exit plan. keith.kelly@nypost.com