Longtime Hearst publisher Valerie Salembier, currently senior vice president, publisher and chief revenue officer of Town & Country, is stepping down on Dec. 31, she told Media Ink.
“At the end of the year, I’ll be leaving the media world,” she said. “My new start-up will be me.”
Salembier will open a small, five-person shop called The Salembier Group on Jan. 1.
At Hearst, she was publisher of Esquire from 1996 until 2003 and then Harper’s Bazaar for seven years. She’s been at T&C since May 2011.
“I’ve always done start-ups or turnarounds,” said Salembier.
She said she will leave Hearst with Town & Country’s ad revenue up 10 percent from a year ago.
The Hearst veteran also plans to pursue a project that she started 20 years ago but put aside: a novel about a woman executive running a big urban tabloid.
She won’t have to reach too far into her imagination for source material. Earlier in her career, she was publisher of The Post during the Peter Kalikow era. (Some dubbed her “Salarie Valembier” for reportedly pulling in a $400,000-a-year salary.)
Salembier also served as publisher of Family Circle, when it was a part of a women’s magazine group once owned by The New York Times Co.
She is a longtime friend and ally of former Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black, going back to their days at Ms. magazine and when they both served as executives who helped launch USA Today for Gannett in 1983, criss-crossing the country together.
When Salembier followed Black to Hearst in the mid-1990s, she was used as a troubleshooter on some of the company’s struggling titles, often after Black had axed a longtime executive.
There were some who had expected to see Salembier exit shortly after Black stepped away as president of the group in mid-2010 and then left the company entirely in November 2010 to take an ill-fated appointment as Chancellor of New York City schools for Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Instead, Salembier stayed on board for another two years under Black’s successor, current Hearst Magazines President David Carey.
In her new firm, which will be located at Madison Avenue and 57th Street, Salembier said she will be working with an undisclosed designer to “relaunch his brand.”
Salembier will also step up her work on two charities, New York Police Foundation, a not-for-profit that works on behalf of the NYPD, and the Anti-Counterfeiting Initiative, which she started while publisher of Harper’s Bazaar. Its aim is to crack down on fake designer handbags, shoes and clothing.
Michael Clinton, president of sales and marketing at Hearst, said of her departure, “We started talking about it earlier this summer. There’s no announcement of a replacement yet — but I expect a lot of people to put their hands up.”
For sale
Manhattan Media, a large weekly newspaper chain in Manhattan, is on the block. Owner Isis Ventures, headed by Richard Burns, is in serious talks with two potential suitors.
Burns said all parts of the company were profitable and that it plans to hang onto the Latin Trade Group and Dan’s Papers in the Hamptons.
The properties combined have revenues of about $35 million.
Assets for sale include Avenue magazine and a chain of Manhattan weeklies including City & State, Our Town, West Side Spirit and Chelsea Clinton News. They have revenue of about $12 million.
News that the Manhattan Media was for sale was first broken by Crain’s New York website.
Blame Kroger
The Source Interlink, a magazine publisher and distribution company, has put in some deep pay cuts for the part of its company involved in distributing to retail outlets.
Only about 600 of the company’s 6,000 employees will be affected. The moves include a 10 percent pay cut to all officers of the company and a 5 percent pay cut to all other employees.
Insiders got the word last week.
The cuts come after the company lost the distribution contract to get magazines into the Kroger grocery chain — believed to be the second biggest customer for the distribution business, behind Barnes & Noble.
The business went to the Jim Pattison News Group, headed by Canadian Jimmy Pattison.
In addition to the distribution business, the company is a big publisher of special interest magazines, including Motor Trend.
Many of the magazines are titles that the company picked up when it vastly overpaid for the consumer magazine division of Primedia, the media company that was being busted up by Henry Kravis in 2007.
The company shed over $1 billion of its $1.9 billion debt load when it went through a pre-packaged bankruptcy in 2009. The company at the time was controlled by investor Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Cos., which he lost to lenders during the proceedings.
In recent weeks, the Source Interlink has been negotiating for new long-term debt agreement with principal banker JPMorgan.