Business

Whole Living bid lives with OpenGate backing

OpenGate Capital Partners is said to be providing the financial backing to former Hachette Filipacchi CEO Jack Kliger in his bid to buy Whole Living magazine from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Dealing with domestic diva Martha Stewart is never easy, and OpenGate’s founder, Andy Nikou, is known for being fairly tight-fisted when it comes to paying for magazine properties. He famously took over TV Guide for $1 and got the then-owner, Macromedia, to loan him $10 million as part of the “purchase.”

Kliger, who ran Hachette for 10 years, has been running TV Guide for OpenGate since October 2009 as the de facto CEO, although he has never formally held that title. That’s because he is also helping run the laddie magazine Maxim for Alpha Media, which became an unwanted ward of Cerberus Capital Partners after Quadrangle Group defaulted on the loan.

Sources say the Whole Living deal — which will keep the 10-times-a-year magazine alive — involves only about $2.5 million in cash, plus the assumption of about $2 million of liabilities, including unfulfilled subscriptions and severance payments.

A spokeswoman for MSLO declined to comment. Kliger and OpenGate could not be reached.

Bad Times

The New York Times Co. year-end buyout is actually looking for at least 60 bodies — double the number revealed earlier this week.

The newsroom buyout of 30 was detailed in a memo from Executive Editor Jill Abramson on Monday. That involved so-called “exempted,” or basically non-union newsroom personnel — primarily editors and newsroom management.

But that is only part of a larger buyout under way by Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr.

The publisher quietly told the advertising side a few weeks earlier that he was looking for 30 exempted employees from there to “volunteer” for buyouts as well.

On top of that, the Times acquiesced to a request from the Newspaper Guild to extend the buyout offer to its unionized members.

Guild President William O’Meara said in a memo that “the Guild has been assured that no layoffs of union members are contemplated at this time.”

Any volunteers from the unionized side will not count toward the target of paring 60 exempted employees from the company rolls.

If the company does not reach its goal of 60 volunteers from the non-unionized ranks, it will go to mandatory layoffs in that sector.

’Cane pain

Hurricane Sandy damage is keeping American Media Inc. and the Mort Zuckerman-owned Daily News from returning to their downtown offices at 4 New York Plaza.

AMI recently inked a pact to temporarily house about 80 people at the 2 Park Ave. offices of Bonnier Publications, which has been downsizing of late. The office will be home to the editorial staffs of Star, OK! and the National Enquirer as well as Shape, Muscle + Fitness, and Men’s Fitness.

American Media CEO David Pecker was told recently by the landlord that the building would not be habitable until sometime in January. About 300 employees were displaced by the storm.

Pecker already has salespeople operating out of printer R.R. Donnelley’s offices at Grand Central Terminal, and accounting and other back-shop operations leasing temporary space from Reader’s Digest Association in White Plains.

Meanwhile, Zuckerman has not told staffers when they will be back inside. Early on, he reportedly said they could be out for up to a year.

New York’s so-called hometown paper has been forced to relocate most of its editors and some reporters to its Liberty View production plant in Jersey City, NJ, on the other side of the Hudson River.

Many columnists are working from home, and others are scattered here and there in offices in New York.

One source said some of the Web staffers are working out of the Associated Press building on West 33rd Street. Ironically, that building was the former home of the News before Zuckerman moved the staff to its current waterlogged headquarters.

Zuckerman did not return a call by press time.

Book ’em

Want to get a jump on the best-seller list?

Publishers Weekly is going on air on Sirius XM Radio with a one-hour weekly show starting tomorrow on Channel 80 that will reveal the list before it appears in print.

The best-seller list takes a detailed look, powered by numbers from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of the industry’s sales each week.

The show will be hosted by PW Senior Editor Mark Rotella and Rose Fox, the reviews editor, who will reveal what’s hot in book publishing, “must read” editors’ picks and behind-the-scenes intrigues in publishing.

“Publishers Weekly is not just a group of insider journalists; we are deeply passionate about the magic of books and the fascinating industry that creates them,” said George Slowik, Jr., Publishers Weekly president and CEO.