Sandra Lee — celebrity chef, TV host, cookbook author and gal pal of Gov. Andrew Cuomo — is shopping for a new publisher.
For the past three years, her magazine, Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade, has been published through a joint venture with Birmingham, Ala.-based Hoffman Media. Lee is said to be unhappy that rival titles from Rachael Ray and Paula Deen and even Martha Stewart’s downmarket Everyday Food are far bigger than the 300,000 paid circulation for her six-times-a-year title.
Lee and Hoffman Media are expected to announce as early as today that the January/February 2012 issue will be the last one published by Hoffman as Lee attempts to consolidate her brands under a new venture. Sources say they will portray it as an amicable split.
Sources said Lee sees herself as a more accessible version of Stewart and believes that with the right partner, her magazine publishing fortunes could soar.
However, Lee has plenty of competition. Food Network Magazine has a circulation of 1.4 million. Everyday with Rachael Ray, which saw $10 million in red ink as advertising eroded, still boasts circulation of 1.7 million. Even the Hoffman-published Cooking with Paula Deen boasts circulation of 540,545 copies.
Much like Ray’s, Lee’s domestic-arts empire is aimed at the harried, middle-class working woman, with a chef-blend that uses 70 percent pre-packaged food and 30 percent fresh ingredients. Her two shows, “Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee” and “Sandra’s Money Saving Meals,” both air on the Food Network. She has published more than 25 books — many of them best-sellers.
Goldie on go
We finally know where former amNewYork Editor-in-Chief Diane Goldie is heading.
She resigned from the freebie paper last month and said she was going to work on an undisclosed project at parent Newsday with Debby Krenek, who was promoted to senior vice president of digital operations for Cablevision, which owns Newsday.
Cablevision said Monday it’s expanding Newsday into Westchester with digital-only products and named Goldie the new editor of local media for Cablevision.
Cablevision did not reveal if the Westchester venture will have a new name to distinguish it from the Long Island paper, but Tad Smith, Cablevision’s president of local media, revealed that Newsday is hiring about “25 new editors, reporters and digital content specialists” for the venture in Westchester.
Smith also said that he plans to align amNewYork, which is still without an editor, more closely with Newsday’s editorial operations and Cablevision media sales.
Fed plays defense
The Federal Reserve remained on the defensive yesterday, pushing back against a story in Bloomberg Markets magazine last month that said the Fed pumped far more money into the nation’s largest banks at the height of the fiscal crisis than previously disclosed.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said the numbers in the report were “wildly inaccurate” and the report contained “egregious errors.”
Bloomberg LP and Fox News successfully pushed all the way to the Supreme Court to gain access to the documents — whose release was opposed by the Fed and the Clearinghouse Association, a group of the biggest US banks — about the funds they received from 2007 to 2009.
Bloomberg Markets on Nov. 27 released a bombshell story that said the “Fed had committed $7.7 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system — more than half the value of everything produced in America in the US that year.” Because of the rescue, it said, banks reaped an estimated $13 billion in revenue by “taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”
Bernanke insisted yesterday that the real number is closer to $1.5 trillion and that taxpayers benefited by the bailout.
“To be sure, that is a very large amount, but it was necessary to ensure that the crucial mistake made during the Great Depression — failing to prevent the collapse of the financial systems — was not repeated.”
Bloomberg Markets contended that the government made secret loans to the big banks, which it never had any intention of disclosing to the public. “Bloomberg stands by its reporting,” said Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.
MIA
The New York Press Club held its annual holiday party on Monday night, and, in a rare occurrence, none of the top press officials or commissioners from any of Mayor Mike Bloomber
g’s departments showed.
Some in attendance noted the absence and felt it might have been a snub because the Bloomberg administration was angry about the criticism for clearing Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters.
At least seven journalists were arrested in the pre-dawn raid that cleared the park, prompting the Deadline Club, the New York Press Club and others to condemn what they felt was mistreatment of journalists on the scene reporting.
However, public relations representatives from the NYPD and Fire Department of New York insisted the absences were due to scheduling conflicts.
Also, the Press Club held its party in an executive suite at Yankee Stadium, which made it a little less accessible than its usual bash in Midtown Manhattan.
Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano, who attended in the past, had a good excuse to miss this year. He was at the Water Club handing off a $240,000 check from the New York Firefighters Burn Center Foundation to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
“If we could have made it, we would have been there,” said FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbon.
At police headquarters, spokesman Paul Browne said that he had only received an e-mail alerting him to the event the day it happened and added that there was no edict from on high to skip it.
“I would not read anything into it,” said Browne. “If I was aware of it earlier, I would have stopped by.”
Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser insisted, “It was absolutely nothing from on high. The mayor had three events [Monday] night, including the NYC & Co. Foundation gala at the Hilton, where he was a speaker.”