Jann Wenner is said to be quietly exploring a sale of celebrity magazine Us Weekly to Condé Nast and the price tag could hit $750 million.
“Jann is definitely trying to sell Us Weekly,” said an industry source.
Speculation about a sale of the magazine began to swirl yesterday after Wenner, during an appearance earlier this week on “The Charlie Rose Show,” was asked by the show’s host, “So what’s this story that Condé Nast wants to buy Rolling Stone?”
Though Rose was wrong about the magazine that’s for sale, he wasn’t off the mark about Wenner’s desire to sell a Wenner Media asset to Condé Nast – the lucrative Us Weekly.
A Wenner Media spokesman dismissed the talk: “There are no talks. Wenner Media and its properties are not for sale.”
A Condé Nast spokeswoman said, “It is a company policy to never comment on potential acquisitions.”
The industry source said it would make “perfect sense for Condé Nast to buy US Weekly” given “it’s women, it’s celebrities and Us Weekly is respectable now.”
With weekly paid circulation of more than 1.8 million – and the lucrative newsstand accounting for 1 million of that total – Us Weekly is highly profitable, with an operating profit last year estimated to be around $75 million. Condé Nast owns Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
Us Weekly is one of the more remarkable success stories in recent publishing history.
When Wenner first embarked on the mission to convert Us from a monthly to a weekly in 2000, he was said to have lost $30 million. By February 2001, he turned to Walt Disney Co. as a joint-venture partner.
In 2006, Wenner bought back Disney’s 50 percent stake for an estimated $300 million.
Wenner was rumored to have explored a sale of Us Weekly and Men’s Journal to Hearst last year, but nothing came of it.
A sale of Us Weekly to a financial player would be difficult in the current credit market, so a full-blown auction seems unlikely.
Putting Rolling Stone up for sale would also appear unlikely, sources said, given Wenner founded the magazine. keith.kelly@nypost.com