Teresa
Guidice, one of the stars of “Real Housewives of New Jersey” — who was revealed by The Post earlier this month to be bankrupt and have run up $11 million in personal debt — is selling access to herself to celebrity magazines in a pay-to-play bid to raise some sorely needed cash.
She is expected to be in next week’s InTouch, talking about her workout and body, according to industry insiders.
But other magazines are annoyed because the Bravo TV star is trying to freeze out other celebrity magazines which are trying to cover the TV show.
InTouch is the same magazine that published Michelle “Bombshell” McGee‘s story of her affair with Jesse James, the now-estranged husband of Sandra Bullock. They paid an estimated $30,000 for her pictures.
Guidice is said to be getting less than $10,000 for “photo rights” to her story. The stories are not tied to her money woes and are not directly tied to coverage of the TV show.
A spokeswoman for Bravo declined to comment.
Will King Kong return to Modern Luxury?
Michael Kong, who founded the regional magazine publisher Modern Luxury Media in Chicago with one title, Chicago Social (CS), in 1993, only to be forced out this February when the company defaulted on $120 million in debt to lenders, is plotting his return.
Sources say Kong is trying to put together a bid to retake control of the company that today publishes 26 magazines, including freebie city titles such as Angeleno in Los Angeles and Manhattan in New York, five bridal magazines, two interior-design titles and three hotel magazines.
As Media Ink revealed earlier, new CEO William Cobert told his employees via e-mail in late April that he was exploring alternatives — including selling the company. “Our shareholders have made a strategic decision to seek a new equity partner or a buyer to support the future development of our company,” Cobert said at the time.
Now that process is winding down and about a dozen private-equity players have put in first-round bids, sources said.
Modern Luxury and Berkery Noyes, the boutique mergers and acquisitions firm which is running the auction, both declined to comment. Kong himself could not be reached.
Sources say a winning bidder could be revealed as early as next week. Kong directed a massive expansion kick after Roy Disney’s Shamrock Capital Growth Fund injected $50 million into the company in 2004 as part of a partnership they formed.
Shamrock exited in 2007, when Clarity Partners, Lehman Brothers and others bought in for $243 million. But when the company defaulted, Clarity and Lehman Brothers were wiped out as investors and the company came to be controlled by a syndicate of lenders headed by GE Business Financial Services and New Star Financial, which put the company on the block.
First-round bids were turned in two weeks ago, and management presentations are now underway to about a dozen potential suitors.
Kim Kelleher stunned Condé Nast when she quit as vice president and publisher of Self, one of the company’s better-performing titles through the recession, and jumped to Sports Illustrated as its chief revenue officer earlier this week.
Outsiders see it as one more sign that the discord stirred by last year’s downsizings and the subsequent cuts in perks and benefits at Condé Nast are making it harder for the publisher to hang on to key people. Condé Nast was once the glitzy publisher that raided other publishers.
After a little intramural rivalry, Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend yesterday named Teen Vogue Publisher Laura McEwen to fill the vacant post. McEwen had been a force in the digital side as well as the retail side, creating “pop up” retail stores in malls around the country called The Teen Vogue Haute Spot around the holidays.
The magazine recently signed a year-long lease in the Westchester Mall for a semi-permanent Teen Vogue store. She also has a Teen Vogue Haute Spot iPhone app, one of the first in the company, that was supported by advertisers and paying consumers.
All the buzz has helped to push Teen Vogue up 15.5 percent in the first half of the year — to 354.1 ad pages. Kelleher was re cruited in large mea sure because of her ability to sell in both the digital and print worlds. She replaced the former SI Publisher Jeff Griffing, who resigned to become chief revenue officer of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. keith.kelly@nypost.com