David Leppan (
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Kate White is stepping down as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and will be replaced by another editor in the Hearst empire, Joanna Coles.
Coles is the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire.
As part of the shake-up, Anne Fulenwider, who had left the No. 2 job at Marie Claire to jump to Condé Nast as editor-in-chief of Brides, is returning to Marie Claire, this time in the No. 1 job.
The changing of the guard is happening with dizzying speed.
White will finish up the November issue of Cosmo this week, then check out on Friday. She’ll finish the year on a number of yet-to-be-defined “consulting projects” for Hearst magazine President David Carey.
Coles, just back from a two-week vacation on the French Riviera, will take over on Monday.
While such a quick series of changes at the top of the company’s most profitable magazine would ordinarily raise eyebrows, all parties insist that White’s move is voluntary.
Given Cosmo’s standing, the editor change is far and away the biggest one that Hearst magazine president Carey will make.
White has eight novels to her credit, most recently “So Pretty It Hurts,” the latest in the travails of the fictional true crime reporter Bailey Weggins.
A self-help memoir, “I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This,” is ready to hit from HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins, which also publishes her novels.
(HarperCollins is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post.)
“I went to David Carey in January and told him I wanted to step down by the end of the year,” said White. She said she’d like to use the book as a springboard to a career doing more motivational speaking.
“I wrote the book aware that I was going to be leaving,” she said. Of course, she may have been mindful that Hearst brass frowned on former magazine president Cathie Black when she published her own career-advice memoir while still running the company.
White’s departure wraps up an 18-year career at Hearst — the last 14 at Cosmo and the previous four running Redbook.
Coles survived some shaky early years at Marie Claire to emerge as the chief of Cosmo, a magazine with 65 international editions that is still the most profitable in the Hearst stable — ahead of O, the Oprah Magazine, and Good Housekeeping.
Its total circulation is 3,017,834 for the six-month period ended June 30, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. And it also has 101,464 digital subscriptions, which makes it the top digital publication.
Online, it draws 8 million unique visitors a month.
ABC numbers show the title averages 1,351,738 copies sold on newsstands per month in the first half of 2012 — and while that represented a 15.5 percent decline from a year ago, it is still a formidable number.
The New Single Copy newsletter pegged Cosmo as the best-selling newsstand monthly in the US.
Coles will be trying her hand at editing for a much younger-skewing publication famous for its advice on sex and relationships. Before Marie Claire, she had edited More, a magazine aimed at women aged 40-plus, and had a long stint near the top of the masthead at New York magazine after working in newspapers.
“I think Cosmo is primarily a magazine about confidence-building, aimed at women in their 20s and 30s as they embark on their life journey,” said Coles.
Marie Claire used to pride itself on adding thought-provoking pieces on world and national problems to its mix of fashion and lifestyle, and that’s one part of the formula Coles said she’d like to import to her new gig as well.
“I’d like to add some campaigns,” she said. “It’s important to speak out for single women and the fight over birth control, abortion and women’s health issues,” she said. “I want Cosmo to be there waving the flag for them.”
Coles will definitely be importing some of her own people to fill jobs at Cosmo. “I’ll probably make changes, but I want to get there first,” she said. “I’ll probably take a few people with me.”
Which means after the first big shake-up, there will likely be a series of smaller tremors.
That’s rich
South African-born multimillionaire David Leppan has just launched billionaire.com, a new website with a companion biannual magazine targeting the über-wealthy.
And tonight, another digital and print venture, DuJour Media, plans to hold its launch party at Capitale with cover girl Christy Turlington on hand.
As for Leppan, he said he plans to follow up the Web launch with a coffee-table book with a distribution of 5,000 — one version in English and a smaller run in Mandarin — that will only go to individuals worldwide with a net worth of $30 million.
The enterprise, with a staff of 15 to 20 people, is based in Singapore, where it is edited by Christian Barker, former editor in chief of The Rake.
“It is billed as a lifestyle publication, fostering appreciation of artisinal luxury, but we are also attempting to weave a thread of philanthropy through it,” he said at lunch yesterday at media hot spot Michael’s.
As part of the philanthropy push, he said he recently contributed $1 million to help back a Global Poverty Project that is staging a mega-concert in Central Park on Sept. 29 that will headline Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters and the Black Keys.
Leppan, who spends most of his time in London and Singapore, made his fortune in the financial-intelligence world, keeping tabs on what he called the “black sheep and the gray sheep” in the world of international finance through a company he founded in 2000 called World-Check.
He sold a partial interest to Spectrum Equity Partners and HarborVest Partners five years ago for around $200 million. Leppan kept about a 30 percent stake for himself.
In 2011, all of World-Check was sold to Thomson Reuters for a reported $530 million.
The print version, in a sense, will be a referendum highlighting the most popular articles to be accessed by billionaire.com over a six-month period.
Leppan plans to publish a fall/winter edition this year, followed by a spring/summer edition in 2013.
So far, he said, he’s spent about $1 million developing the project over the past year. “We’ve identified well over 2,000 billionaires worldwide,” said Leppan.