Conde Nast Chief Operating Officer John Bellando‘s budget talks with the company’s editors and publishers look like they’ve scared fiscal responsibility into some of the highest-rolling titles at the glitzy empire.
Bellando is meeting with the publisher’s top brass this week, and those talks are having an affect on plans to attend the upcoming European fashion shows.
Graydon Carter, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, who had also intended to make the trek, is now playing corporate good citizen and skipping the runway shows.
Publisher Ed Menicheschi, who is chasing fashion business for the magazine, is still making his annual pilgrimage.
A VF spokeswoman said Carter still intends to travel to Europe, but is postponing his trip till later in the fall.
Glamour Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive and Publisher Bill Wackerman, who are also heading to Europe, are scheduled to meet Bellando today. Leive was originally planning to stay at the Ritz, but it could not be learned if her plans had changed.
Nobody at rival publishing houses is getting the royal treatment.
Elle’s Chief Brand Officer Carol Smith and Editor-in-Chief Roberta Myers stay at the somewhat less swanky Park Hyatt in Paris, where they are likely to bump into In Style Editor-in-Chief Ariel Foxman and Publisher Connie Anne Phillips.
Spared
There is good news for Teen Vogue, Allure and Dan Peres‘ Details, all of which are believed to be bleeding red ink at Condé Nast and were on the watch list for possible shutdowns.
Instead, they are all going to be spared, at least this year, insiders said last week.
A report from management consultants McKinsey & Co., now in the preparation stage, is expected to provide a blueprint for keeping all the magazine brands intact, al though there will be some major ratcheting down of ex penses, as has been widely reported.
In advance
This is one heck of a way to start a new job.
Charles Duhigg, the New York Times reporter who most recently has been investigating the nation’s water supply, just snagged a hefty advance from Random House to write “The Power of Habit: What the New Science of Habit Formation Can Teach Us About How We Live, Work, Spend, Build and Succeed.”
Sources tell Media Ink that the advance was for $750,000.
The deal was signed by Andy Ward, the former executive editor of GQ, who last month quit to return to book publishing.
He doesn’t start his new job at Random House until Monday, but he was greenlighted to do the deal by Susan Kamil, the editorial director, and Gina Centrello, the president and publisher of the Random House publishing group.
It was a preemptive bid, knock ing other publishers out of the running.
Said one publisher who had been hoping to bid: “They probably think it’ll be like [Malcolm Glad well‘s] ‘The Tipping Point’ — sociology combined with self- help. It’s a big gamble, though.”
Random House con firmed they’ve got the book, which was brokered by agent Scott Moyers of the Wylie agency, but declined to reveal the size of the advance.
Pay-per
Starting next year, Variety will no longer be free online.
“There’s a migration going on from print to digital,” said Variety Publisher Brian Gott. “If we don’t develop a paid digital strategy by the time the complete migration occurs, we won’t be a paid-content business.”
While the print edition of Variety costs $329 a year, Gott said a price for the online subscription has not been worked out yet. However, he added that any subscription fee will ex tend across platforms.
“You will pay a sin gle price and we will deliver it any way you want it — iPhone, mobile, digi tal edition or print,” he said.
Meanwhile, its arch rival, The Hollywood Reporter, denied a re port that it would abolish its print edition this year.
“It’s just not true,” said Gerry Byrne, senior vice president of the media and entertainment group of Nielsen Business Media, THR’s parent company.
The publication charges a fee on line and has a four- tier pricing structure already in place. But Byrne didn’t shoot down the report en tirely — just the part about going online-only in 2009.
“I’m not going to predict what is going to happen next year or the year after,” he said.
Meanwhile, the print and online versions of the Washington Post will officially merge into one unit on Jan. 1, Publisher Katharine Weymouth said in a memo to employees yesterday.
Weymouth wrote that it was “important to create one organization for print and online operations that would mirror the percep tion of readers, users and advertisers,” according to the Washington Business Journal, which broke the story online.