HACHETTE Filipacchi Media, publisher of Elle, Woman’s Day and Car and Driver, is preparing to vacate the space it’s had in Midtown since the late 1980s, and is said to be scouting for space in the Wall Street area.
That means that the offices where John F. Kennedy Jr. once plied his trade as the founder and editor-in-chief of the now-defunct George magazine will be no more.
The company has been at 1633 Broadway since the legendary Peter Diamandis engineered a leveraged buyout of the old CBS Magazines from its parent company, and renamed it Diamandis Communications Inc. in 1987.
After Jack Kliger last year walked away as CEO, the company dispatched Alain Lemarchand from Paris to take over, and he’s been cutting costs, including pulling out of the Magazine Publishers of America, which saved Hachette between $300,000 to $400,000 a year in dues.
The rent bill for their offices is considerably higher; one source estimated that the six floors at 1633 Broadway cost the company close to $15 million a year.
A move downtown could slice that in half. The current long-term lease is believed to expire next year.
This week, the company unveiled a restructuring around chief brand officers in which publishers were put in charge of editors, clearly with an eye toward focusing on digital and mobile content.
Meanwhile, there are rumors that more cutbacks are coming.
A spokeswoman declined to comment on any pending move or the job-cut rumors.
Furor
The 3,500 employees inside Reader’s Digest Association went into a tizzy when they learned earlier this week that the company had just hired Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm specializing in restructuring companies, including, among other things, guiding beleaguered firms through bankruptcy proceedings.
The move came just days after the company had reported disappointing second-quarter results that led the two major rating agencies, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, to lower RDA’s debt rating to junk status.
The brouhaha inside the company forced CEO Mary Berner to quickly explain in a memo to all employees Wednesday what was afoot in the corporate suite.
“Additional news outlets picked up the Bloomberg story and, unable to confirm it, added their own speculation,” she complained. From this, starting with one unattributed source supposedly “familiar” with the situation, news articles jumped to the conclusion that RDA was filing for bankruptcy, she said.
“I want to assure [you] that is not true,” said Berner.
She did say RDA has “proactively hired Kirkland & Ellis, which advises companies on a vast array of corporate matters, as well as top financial adviser, Miller Buckfire, to advise us on a wide range of restructuring and financing issues.”
Berner said that while second-quarter results were down, she insisted that “we continue to meet our debt covenants and in no way are we in default under our financing arrangements.”
She said the two firms that were recently hired “will assist the company in staying ahead of the problems in the market by exploring strategic initiatives, including but not limited to raising additional capital and easing our debt burden.”
The company, which was taken over by Ripplewood Holdings in March 2007 for $2.6 billion, has a mountain of debt estimated at $2.1 billion.
“Given the volatility of world markets, it’s easy to understand how something like this was blown out of proportion,” Berner added.
Art mag
The daily arts coverage in the New York Sun may have bitten the dust with the newspaper, but Manhattan Media is attempting to revive at least some of the arts coverage with a new publication called City Arts.
The pub will be inserted into three of the company’s weekly newspapers – the New York Press, Our Town and West Side Spirit – starting March 12.
“We see it filling the gap in the art world that was created by the demise of the New York Sun,” said Manhattan Media founder Tom Allon.
The right-leaning Sun, which had been led by Seth Lipsky, never reached the circulation it had hoped for, but did generate a strong following among the literati and gallery-loving crowd in Manhattan.
“We want to resurrect the arts coverage of the Sun, which was arguably one of its strongest attributes,” Allon said.
To that end, Allon has recruited some of the out-of-work ex-Sun critics for the effort – at least on a freelance basis. Lance Esplund, the Sun’s senior art critic, and Jay Nordlinger, the Sun’s senior music critic, will hold the same positions on the new publication. Joel Lobenthal, the Sun’s senior dance critic, and art critic Bryce Brown will also work with the new title.
Meanwhile, New York Press Editor- in-Chief Jerry Port wood and Arts Editor Adam Rathe will do double duty working on the new publication. keith.kelly@nypost.com