Rumors that Anna Last is exiting from Everyday Food, the Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia-owned food title, are true, Media Ink has learned — even if they have taken Last by surprise.
Reached yesterday by Media Ink, Last insisted nothing was afoot. “I’m very happy at Every Day Food,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re looking forward to 2012. There’s no truth to that.”
But our sources say that Martha Stewart is expected to announce as soon as today that Sarah Carey, the food editor of the flagship Martha Stewart Living title, who has been with the company since 1999, is going to get the gig.
Carey could not be reached at presstime.
The magazine has circulation of 1.025 million, but through September its ad pages were down 16 percent, to 231.7. Carey is expected to start a bigger digital push for the magazine.
Every Day With Rachael Ray is also getting a new editor — as soon as it completes its extraction from Reader’s Digest Association and formally gets taken over by Meredith Corp.
Although an agreement has not been inked, it is said to be getting closer. The incumbent editor, Liz Vaccariello, already announced she’s staying behind at RDA as the new chief content officer while Family Circle Editor-in-Chief Linda Fears at Meredith plans to temporarily run the show while looking for a permanent replacement.
EDWRR, which was once making about $6 million, could lose close to $10 million this year, as its ad pages tumbled 21.3 percent through September.
Ex-Marques spot
There was a another high-level departure at the Daily News late last week as senior managing editor Stuart Marques was handed his walking papers. Marques didn’t even get the courtesy of a send-off from editor-in-chief Kevin Convey, who himself is said to be under pressure from owner Mort Zuckerman to reverse the paper’s newsstand slide.
Instead, sources said, Marques was called to human resources late Friday and axed.
Calls to Marques and to his wife, Joanne Wasserman, who still works at the News as Brooklyn bureau chief, were not returned. But he must have had an inkling his days were numbered. Sources said he was already headed to a European vacation.
For Marques, it was his second stint at the News. In between, he had worked at The Post as metro editor and the now-defunct New York Sun — and as press secretary for the United Federation of Teachers.
His departure has stirred new fears at the Zuckerman-owned paper that life in their new digs downtown near the World Trade Center site — where they moved this spring — will be little different than life at their old base on West 33rd Street.
Cutbacks every several years have become a part of the routine, and Zuckerman is said to be particularly discouraged that his $150 million investment in the new four-color printing presses has not paid off.
Marques’ departure follows by several weeks the exit of veteran columnist Michael Daly for Tina Brown’s Newsweek Daily Beast.
Daly, who spent more than 20 years at the News, specialized in the streets of New York reporting, especially cops and firemen. He had been short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his reporting in the post-9/11 era. He held up his departure from the News long enough to cover the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
On the business side, the paper let go ad executive Joe Stella in June. He was a 24-year veteran of the paper.
A News spokeswoman declined to comment on Marques or even confirm that he was gone.
“We don’t comment on personnel matters,” said the spokeswoman, Jennifer Mauer.
No replacement has been named by presstime.
Daily growth
Apple Newsstand opened last week and The Daily, the News Corp.-owned tablet newspaper, turned out to be the top-grossing app of the week. [News Corp. also owns the Post.]
Rounding out the top 10: National Geographic Magazine, Wired, The New Yorker, NY Times for iPad, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Martha Stewart Living, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science.
“It’s intriguing that an upstart publication is beating Condé Nast titles and the New York Times,” said Jesse Angelo, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily.
Currently, he said, the Daily has about 130,000 total customers including 85,000 paid customers.
The majority of the paying customers are choosing the $39.99 annual subscription rate over the 99 cents a week rate. About 45,000 others have signed up for the free two-week trial offer of The Daily; they’ve been converting to paying customers in the 12 percent to 15 percent range.