Business

Hearst’s road to Oz

Chris Hughes

Chris Hughes (REUTERS)

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Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon known as America’s Doctor, is said to be negotiating with Hearst about an eponymously named magazine that would launch in the second half of the year.

No contract has been finalized, but one source said it was ”about 90 percent there.”

Such a title from the good doctor could serve as newsstand sales Viagra for Hearst Magazines and the rest of the industry, which have struggled with flaccid individual sales.

For the most recent Nielsen ratings for the week ended Jan. 13, Dr. Oz was the No. 3 afternoon talker with 3.4 million viewers — behind only Dr. Phil McGraw, with 4.2 million, and Ellen DeGeneres, with 3.7 million, who is not a doctor but once played one on TV.

Oz is a consistently strong newsstand draw whenever he appears on magazine covers — which seem to come at the rate of at least one major cover per month.

His most recent cover appearance was the January issue of O, the Oprah Magazine.

O, that once red-hot title, is a joint venture between former talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and Hearst.

At its launch 13 years ago, O had one of the fastest starts and roads to profitability of any magazine in Hearst’s history.

For many years it remained the company’s No. 1 moneymaker after Cosmopolitan — although it was passed by a resurgent Elle in 2012.

That was a year after Oprah abandoned her top-rated syndicated show for her own cable channel, OWN.

Despite Oprah’s slump, Hearst still seems to be master of the joint venture.

In recent years, HGTV and the Food Network Magazine, both in partnership with Scripps, have turned into instant newsstand hits.

Hearst apparently had some competition for an Oz joint venture. The 52-year-old Columbia University professor also apparently toyed with the idea of a joint venture with Time Inc.

Time Inc. dangled an offer to rechristen its struggling Health magazine as Dr. Oz’s Health, sources said.

Oz has a close relationship with the company as a contributor to Time magazine — but so far Hearst seems to have the inside track.

Hearst President David Carey has said that he hoped to unveil a new joint venture in the second half of 2013 — but at the time declined to name the partner.

Neither side is ready to confirm a deal — or that they are talking.

An Oz spokesman said, “Magazines always report sales go up when they work with Dr. Oz. We’ll never rule anything out, but we don’t have a deal with anyone.”

Said Carey: “We don’t comment on our development activities.”

Digi doin’s

Condé Nast publishers and top executives gathered at their annual publishers meeting at the Fours Seasons Resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday and got their first peek at the company’s first digital video channels — which will showcase Glamour and GQ.

They are expected to launch sometime this quarter.

Later in the year, Vogue and Wired will follow with their own digital video channels.

Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend told Media Ink that the free video-on-demand channels will be advertiser-supported. They’ll be available on YouTube, AOL, Amazon, Yahoo! and other platforms, he said — “anybody with video distribution.”

Digital channels are one of Dawn Ostroff’s signature products.

Ostroff’s Consumer Entertainment Division is also striving to turn articles from Condé Nast titles into movies or TV pilots — but is encountering some pushback from writers on that front.

The writers don’t want to surrender their film rights. Those projects can take several years to develop.

The video-on-demand channels are only weeks away.

“It’s not a clunky, scroll-along download,” said Townsend. He said the software was developed by Fred Santarpi
a, who joined Condé Nast from Vevo.

Townsend said the channels will feature daily short-form videos a few minutes in length.

The company has already sold a $2 million ad buy and is on the brink of several others.

“I think you’ll see the big beauty guys, the big financial guys and the major fashion houses as advertisers,” he said.

The projects had been under wraps until the Palm Beach meeting — where the company doled out its intramural pats on the back to its own titles.

First place went to Allure publisher Agnes Chapski for doubling the operating profit in the past year and ranking first in total pages and revenue growth.

Second place went to W publisher Lucy Kriz, who produced a 9 percent increase in advertising pages and a 16 percent increase in profit.

Vogue publisher Susan Plagemann got a third-place nod. The boss of what is perennially the company’s most profitable magazine managed to add 81 more ad pages to its tally last year.

The company also handed out two executive of the year awards, to Suzanne Reinhardt, at Fairchild, and David Orlin, the senior vice president operations who reworked the company’s multimillion-dollar printing contracts.

And finally, Bon Appetit editor Adam Rapoport and publisher Pamela Drucker Mann were given the collaborative leadership award.

“We had a good year, with low single-digit growth in print and double digit growth on the Web,” said Townsend.

“We’re off to a great start in the first quarter. I hope it continues.”

His only problem: single-copy sales. They were “pretty anemic,” he admits, but noted that tablet and subscription sales were strong.

Time Inc. cuts

Today is the day that Time Inc. insiders have dreaded for months. CEO Laura Lang, on the job for little more than a year, is expected to finally unveil the deep cuts that have been in the works for a while.

The ax is expected to fall in many areas — with the London-based IPC operation and the Tampa, Fla.-based back-shop operations absorbing some steep cuts.

Insiders are now saying that the cuts might not reach the 700-person level that had initially been feared.

However, the cutbacks will still be in the many hundreds and may go down as one of the worst one-day bloodbaths in the history of the company’s magazine operations.

Party time

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, now owner, editor-in-chief and publisher of The New Republic, drew a slew of boldfaced names to his downtown pad for a party to celebrate his purchase of the mag.

Real estate scion and New York Observer owner Jared Kushner made the scene with the latest Observer editor, Ken Kurson.
Nick Lehman, outgoing chairman of the Columbia University School of Journalism, chatted with Steve Jobs biographer and Aspen Institute executive director Walter Isaacson.

Lehman said he thought there might be up to 15 candidates under consideration to succeed him, but that he was not on the search committee so he could not narrow the field.

Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post held court in one corner.

Hughes said he took over the money-losing magazine from Marty Peretz because he thought it was an important institution that deserved to be saved.

With degrees in history and English literature from Harvard, Hughes was one of the rare non-techies at the startup that made him a multimillionaire.