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ared Kushner, publisher of the New York Observer, is invading Sin City.
His Observer Media Group is part of the joint venture behind Vegas Seven, a new weekly that debuted yesterday with 60,000 copies distributed across the city.
Vegas Seven is being put out with Wendoh Media, run by former nightclub promoters Ryan Doherty and Justin Weniger. They are also partners in 944 Media, which has monthly magazines in 11 cities including Las Vegas, San Francisco and Miami.
The new weekly has an 11-person editorial staff, headed by former Desert Companion Editor-in-Chief Phil Hagen.
Doherty said he has booked $3 million in advertising and expects the joint venture to break into the black sometime around the eighth or ninth month of publication, having spent about $1 million.
If so, it will have beaten The Observer to that goal. Kushner said he doesn’t expect the New York weekly to be profitable “until sometime next year.”
Kushner is also trying to downplay any rivalry with Jason Binn, CEO of Niche Media, which publishes Gotham and Hamptons Magazine and which is majority owned by Greenspun Media, a family controlled company that has counted Vegas as its home for 60 years. Their empire there includes the daily Las Vegas Sun, Las Vegas Weekly and the monthly Las Vegas Magazine, as well as KTUD, a local television station.
“He’s a good buddy of mine,” Kushner said of Binn. “He’s great at what he does.”
But Doherty and Weniger have no doubt who their competition is. “Greenspun’s certainly the big company out here,” Doherty said. “We’re the underdogs, but we’re aggressive.”
Doherty said he’s aiming at locals. “Just about everyone out here is connected to the hospitality business,” he said. “If the locals are in the know, they will pass it on. The word of mouth is where you see advertisers get a real return on investments.”
Calls to Binn and Greenspun Media CEO Brian Greenspun weren’t returned by presstime.
Rodale’s gain
Veteran magazine editor John Atwood, who spent 10 years as the editor of Travel & Leisure Golf, which American Ex press Publishing shut down last year, is about to start at Rodale Books as an executive editor.
Atwood ran Sports Afield for Hearst and was a founding editor of Men’s Journal, and has al ways been known to have a literary bent.
Rodale Books has published the bestselling “Eat This, Not That” by Men’s Health Editor-in-Chief David Zinczenko and Al Gore‘s “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Atwood starts Feb. 8, reporting to Karen Rinaldi.
Name drop
Condé Nast is officially dropping the “Publications” from its name.
Workers have removed the word from the wall on the 11th floor of 4 Times Square, where Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr., CEO Charles Townsend and other executives sit. No letterhead will be ordered with “Publications,” and trade ads and press releases will no longer feature it.
“It’s a more coordinated push to use the new logo without the ‘Publications,’ ” said spokeswoman Maurie Perl. “Suffice it to say, we will now be known as Condé Nast.”
The move is meant to suggest that the company is finally getting serious about the online world and thinking about ways to make money other than putting ink on paper.
The company still derives less than 5 percent of its revenue from its digital businesses, but in recent months there seem to have been the first serious efforts to change that.
Yesterday, the company announced a Vanity Fair app that will allow iPhone and iPod users to make Oscar Award picks and get real-time results. Townsend said it is the 11th app that the company has produced this year.
And for the past few weeks, top editors and publishers have been getting a sneak presentation by Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich of the company’s progress on a tablet-ready magazine product for e-readers.
“It’s still a prototype,” said one insider who had gotten a peek. “It’s still pretty far off for everybody but Wired, but people were pleased the company is actually working on this in a real way.” keith.kelly@nypost.com