Hearst Corp. is sticking with its seasoned hand Cathie Black to lead the ad-challenged publishing group that includes glossies Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and O, the Oprah Magazine.
The 64-year-old Black is re-upping as president in a three-year contract, according to people close to the situation.
Some media observers were betting Hearst CEO Frank Bennack, who returned to the top job in June when Victor Ganzi resigned due to “irreconcilable differences,” would follow an example set when he tapped Steve Swartz as the head of Hearst Newspapers late last year.
Bennack also recruited Scott Sassa, a former Turner and NBC exec, to head entertainment and syndication and he also put the 100-year-old Seattle Post Intelligencer on the block last week.
Black, who arrived at the post in the mid-90s, now must bring the venerable US group into the 21st century. Like Ganzi, she is viewed at being slow to develop a strong digital vision. “The company has no digital strategy,” said one executive, who has worked at Hearst.
Being slow off the mark to capitalize on a digital future may try the patience of the family owned company whose board of trustees includes William Randolph Hearst III, a managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of the more successful venture-capital firms in Silicon Valley.
Black has overseen the opening of 14 magazine Web sites which are pulling in 14.1 million unique viewers a month. That’s respectable but not dazzling given the size of the group.
Last year, the company derived about 6.5 percent of its estimated $2 billion in total revenue from the Web. That’s better than the 3 percent that Condé Nast counts on from the Web, but still lags the 10 percent that Time Inc. is notching.
For now, though, Hearst seems convinced that change is not warranted. “Cathie Black is leading one of the most important and thorough re-engineerings of the magazine business ever implemented at Hearst,” said a company spokesperson. “She’s truly creating the magazine company of the future.”
Black declined to be interviewed for this article, but at the Women’s Wear Daily Media Summit in December she discussed the urgency of the challenges ahead.
“Media is now poised in a critical window of time that opens on the double E’s – and I don’t mean electrical engineering. I mean evolution, or to some extent, maybe extinction. The future calls for some intelligent design.”
On the start-up front, Black has overseen one grand slam as Hearst boss, the partnership with Oprah Winfrey to produce O, the Oprah Magazine, while she has been responsible for flops like Quick & Simple and the once red-hot CosmoGirl.
Next week, Hearst is set to publish its second test issue of the Food Network Magazine, with plans to do five more issues this year. keith.kelly@nypost.com