Business

RATTNER WRAPS AT MAXIM

STEVE Rattner, who earlier this week stepped down as President Obama’s car czar, has now also formally lost his grip on lad magazine Maxim after two tortuous years of ownership.

Though Rattner left the hedge fund he founded, Quadrangle Group, six months ago, when he took the job of fixing the troubled auto industry, it’s only now that he and his former partners at Quadrangle — including Peter Ezersky, Josh Steiner and Michael Huber — have officially separated themselves from the apparently sour deal.

Now it is Steven Feinberg’s Cerberus that owns a majority stake in the magazine and its parent company Alpha Media, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Sources say the deal could be announced as early as today.

“I don’t think they are too happy with [Rattner] at Quadrangle,” said one source.

Cerberus, Credit Suisse and other creditors spent months haggling after Quadrangle defaulted on loans taken out to buy Alpha Media, which was originally called Dennis Publishing.

They paid $250 million to British publishing maverick Felix Dennis, with Quadrangle putting up $100 million.

Rattner and his then-partners at Quadrangle took over Alpha, which at the time included Maxim, Blender and Stuff, in 2007. The new owners immediately closed Stuff, and Blender folded last year.

That left the new owners relying heavily on Maxim’s shrinking ad pages to help meet the terms of the debt used to finance the deal. When that strategy failed and Quadrangle defaulted on its debt covenants, a complicated financial game of tug-of-war began.

Neither Alpha Media nor Quadrangle could be reached for comment.

And while Cereberus formally takes control of Maxim, nobody expects it to be a long-term holder.

Bonnie online

Bonnie Fuller, the one-time celebrity-magazine editrix, has landed a new gig in cyberspace as president and editor-in-chief of Hollywoodlife.com, a Web site owned by Jay Penske’s Mail.com Media Corp.

Penske is the son of billionaire race-car driver Roger Penske, who is in the process of taking over car brand Saturn from General Motors.

Landing Fuller marks the second high-profile deal that Jay Penske has struck in recent weeks.

He recently bought out Nikki Finke’s Deadline HollywoodDaily.com.

Asked if she and Finke might end up being rivals in the same tent, Fuller in sisted, “Not at all. Nikki Finke covers the business world of Hollywood. Nobody does it better.”

Fuller said she will be staffing up with “about a dozen employees in New York and Hollywood, but several of them will be part-time.”

Fuller has a record of almost unparalleled success in magazines, having run YM, Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan before stumbling a bit at Glamour and getting ousted from Condé Nast.

She landed at Us Weekly and took over the money-losing property, transforming it into a hot magazine.

After feuding with Us Weekly owner Jann Wenner, she left for American Media, where her high hopes of transforming Star maga zine from a supermarket tabloid into another glossy success story failed to materialize.

In her new venture, Ful ler said she plans to tar get women 18-35 as she seeks to try her hand in cyberspace.

She acknowledged that with success stories like TMZ.com, Peo ple.com and Radar.com, the competition is fierce.

“There’s a lot of competition, but I think I’m coming up with a unique way of approaching the audience,” she said.

Jim Spanfeller is out as president and CEO of Forbes.com, but is expected to stick around until Labor Day while the Forbes brothers and Elevation Partners, the minority owner, search for a replacement.

Spanfeller is also resigning from the seven-person board of directors, where he shared power with Elevation Partners, the investment firm that counts U2 frontman Bono and Roger McNamee among its founding partners.

Sources said the replacement is expected to come from outside the company.

The move was a surprise to many because Spanfeller’s star seemed to be on the rise given he, Chairman Steve Forbes and Chief Operating Officer Timothy Forbes were named to a three-person “office of the chairman,” and Spanfeller was given charge of selling ads for both the magazine and the Web site.

“It’s a shocking, seismic change,” said one insider. “As the head of the dot-com side, he presided over the greatest single expansion in the history of Forbes.”

But that growth has stalled.

One source said that the handwriting may have been on the wall when McNamee resigned from the Forbes Media board, and in no uncertain terms told Media Ink that the money coming in from the dot-com side was no longer covering ad losses at the magazine, which has seen its ad-page count tumble 37 percent so far this year.

Spanfeller told Media Ink that he is going to form a management company that will instruct other companies on how to get into the digital space.

Ten days of frantic negotiations between the Newspaper Guild of New York and Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, has averted a layoff of 21 unionized employees.

In exchange for keeping those jobs, union members would forgo a 3 percent raise that was to kick in at the beginning of next year and skip receiving an employer match to their 401(k) in 2010. Other givebacks include the suspension of an eye-exam program and tuition reimbursement. The concessions are expected to save the not- for- profit Consumers Union $1.8 million next year.

The tentative agreement must be ratified today by the 367 Guild members at Consumers Union, who represent more than half of the 601 total workers at the company.

Insiders said that Time for Kids, the student-ori ented spinoff of the weekly news magazine, was profitable when its ed itorial staff was merged with Sports Illustrated Kids earlier this year. The title is now on summer hiatus.

keith.kelly@nypost.com