THE search for a new editor-in- chief of Life & Style is over.
Insiders say that Bauer Publications is expected to announce, possibly as early as today, that Dan Wakeford will assume the editor-in-chief role.
He is currently an editor at Life & Style’s larger sister title In Touch, and will be the magazine’s sixth editor-in-chief in its short, three-year history.
As reported by Media Ink, Life & Style’s current editor-in-chief, Donna Armstrong, who arrived only in June, is expecting a child and insiders said she wants to return to her native Australia to have the baby.
Wakeford is a veteran of London’s Fleet Street who worked as a news editor at the Sun, a London daily, before landing at In Touch.
“If anyone can turn it around, he can,” said one insider.
Earlier, Wakeford worked on Life & Style when In Touch Editor-in- Chief Richard Spencer was doing double duty supervising both magazines.
Bauer officials could not be reached for comment at presstime.
The magazine earlier this year lowered its rate base and raised its cover price to $2.99, resulting in a decline in the number of units sold but, thanks to the price hike, an in crease in revenue.
The magazine currently prom ises advertisers it will deliver 550,000 copies a week, but in the most recent four-week period, the magazine missed its lowered rate base and sold fewer than 400,000 copies on newsstands.
Alpha bits
There was a bloodbath this week at Alpha Media, owner of Maxim and Blender magazines.
The company is expected to eliminate at least 50 to 60 people as the company relocates much of its back- office operations to the Nashville, Tenn., area by early next year.
Stunned employees at Alpha got the word Wednesday, when the company said that its central services operations, including fi nance, manufacturing and distribution, offices services and digital tech nology, were mak ing the move south to the town of Franklin, Tenn.
The editorial and publishing jobs are not moving.
Alpha was taken over by Quadrangle, the buyout firm run by Steve Rattner and Peter Ezersky, just over a year ago.
In August, Alpha’s recently named CEO Kent Brownridge stepped down suddenly and was replaced by two new co-CEOs, Glenn Rosenbloom and Stephen Duggan.
Within weeks, Brownridge was in action as the new general manager of the US version of OK! magazine, charged with trying to stop the weekly magazine’s cash burn.
Very few of the current staff at Alpha will be relocated, as the company is betting most New York- based workers will remain here and the company can cut costs by hiring cheaper labor in Tennessee.
The architect of the relocation appears to be Duggan, who had been living in Nashville and running another Quadrangle-owned company, the Publishing Group of America.
While Alpha is still profitable, its ad sales are down this year and it isn’t delivering the kind of numbers that keep venture capitalists happy.
A company spokeswoman said that the new office will open in December.
“The goal is to have the transition underway by the end of the first quarter 2009,” she said.
Whew!
Finally, a little good news comes our way.
Now that the union representing the Star-Ledger’s drivers has reached a tentative agreement with the Newhouse family that controls the Newark, NJ-based newspaper, it looks like virtually all of the conditions required to avoid a sale or a shutdown of New Jersey’s largest daily newspaper have been met.
The drivers union, represented by the Newspapers and Mail Deliverers Union, was the lone holdout among the unions negotiating new contracts with Advance Publications, the Newhouse-controlled company that owns Star-Ledger.
Earlier, the pressmen’s union and the mailers union ratified agreements that called for wage freezes and manning level reductions.
“As of 4 p.m. [yesterday], we have a ten tative deal with the Star-Led ger,” said Doug Panattieri, president of the NMDU, which currently repre sents approxi mately 90 drivers at the paper. “Con sidering what is going on out there, I’m happy that both parties came up with an agreement.”
Terms of the pact were not divulged, but it is believed to include a wage freeze and voluntary downsizings similar to the measures taken by the mailers and the pressmen.
The tentative accord must be ratified by the full membership. A vote is slated for Tuesday.
The deal comes as more than 200 people in the non-unionized newsroom indicated that they will accept the paper’s buyout offer.
The Newhouses had imposed strict conditions to avoid a sale or shutdown of the paper, which is believed to be losing between $30 million and $40 million a year. Those conditions included wage concessions from all three unions and voluntary buyouts accepted by at least 200 of the 750 non-unionized personnel.
Donald Newhouse, president of Advance, said that any of the volunteers for the buyout could still change their minds until Tuesday’s deadline, so he wasn’t jumping for joy yet.
“We’re very hopeful that everything will fall into place,” New house said.
Meanwhile, Ad vance’s smaller Tren ton Times looks like it also will be spared. The company said it was expecting to get at least 25 newsroom volunteers from that paper to accept buyouts.