Business

Daily Beast bites exec

TINA Brown has hired a for mer top executive from Felix Dennis‘ laddie empire to be her new president.

Steve Colvin was the US CEO for Dennis Publishing, serving as the steadying business hand for the blustery and controversial founder of Maxim, Blender, Stuff and The Week.

At the Daily Beast, Colvin reports directly to Brown, the chairman and editor-in-chief.

He will have primary responsibility for revenue generation, audience development, brand development and social media. He is also charged with overseeing the recently unveiled Beast Books imprint and additional revenue streams, including an event series.

“We are really on course, we never expected to grow this fast in terms of traffic,” Brown said. She claims the site, which launched 14 months ago, is reaching 3.6 million unique viewers per month.

The Daily Beast is not yet profitable, but is backed by media mogul Barry Diller. One press report said that his IAC committed up to $18 million to the venture — although Brown herself says that figure is inaccurate.

“It’s not the right figure,” she said. Asked what the correct figure might be she demurred, saying, “It certainly isn’t higher.”

Brown declined to say how much of Diller’s money has been sunk into the project so far, but suggested her current investor is an easier boss than Harvey Weinstein, who backed her Talk magazine in a joint venture with Hearst Corp. The magazine folded in early 2002.

She said that the Daily Beast site has had 35 ad campaigns so far and that more are in the works.

Colvin put Maxim on the map in the late 1990s, turned its annual Super Bowl party into a must-see, $1 million extravaganza and launched Dennis Digital in 2005.

He helped with the $225 million sale of Dennis Publications to Steve Rattner‘s Quadrangle Group in 2007, then became a vice president at CNET.

His timing could not have been better. Dennis Publications sold close to the peak of the market. Shortly after the sale, Blender and Stuff were folded; Quadrangle ultimately defaulted on its loan to Cerberus and lost control of the company to an investment group.

Bye Business

Everyone at BusinessWeek knew that layoffs were coming this week, but the bloodbath that ensued yesterday on the editorial side stunned many insiders.

“It’s like a funeral around here,” said one person. Staffers were summoned one by one to HR and returned with either employment packages for Bloomberg LP or sever ance packages from McGraw- Hill. The cuts even included two pregnant journalists, Jena MacGregor and innovation reporter Reena Jana.

Norman Pearlstine, Bloomberg’s chief content officer and soon-to-be chairman of Business Week, cut an estimated 130 people from Business Week’s staff of around 400 — a staggering 33 per cent of the workforce.

The cuts were deepest on the editorial side, where insiders say an estimated 60 to 70 editorial types are going.

Most of the columnists were let go, including Inside Wall Street writer Gene Marcial, Media Centric columnist Jon Fine, tech columnist Steve Wildstrom, the longtime Business Outlook columnist Jim Cooper and tech writer Steve Baker, a 23-year veteran.

Fine had been on a six-month sabbatical while he toured the world with his wife, Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby.

“Some sabbaticals last longer than others,” he said on his Twitter feed yesterday.

Three of the top BW writers, Pete Engardio, Rob Hof and Steve Hamm, are gone. Michael Mandel, chief economist, is out. Other casualties include Lauren Young, personal-finance editor; Heather Green, tech reporter; Kenji Hall, Tokyo reporter; Jay Greene, Seattle bureau chief; Dean Foust, Atlanta bureau chief, and many more in art, production, sales and marketing, according to insiders.

The online video news operation headed by James Leone was also bumped, and half of the 18-person copy desk are gone.

Many of the people on the finance team were offered jobs within Bloomberg News, but not on BusinessWeek.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg‘s company, Bloomberg LP, agreed to pay $9.3 million for the company and assume some liabilities including severance payments. The deal, announced last month, is expected to be completed by Dec. 5.

Many of the staffers started drinking when they got the news and convened at Rockefeller Center wine bar Morrell’s afterward.

Condé digital

Condé Nast said it has an agreement for Adobe to help develop software for digital e-readers, and that it is also in discussions with PC maker Hewlett-Packard.

CEO Charles Townsend said the deal with Adobe is to “collaborate on creating technologies that will allow the company to design and produce a new generation of digital magazines.”

Condé Nast insisted it is not breaking from the multi-company publishing consortium that has been working to come up with industry-wide standards for software that would be compatible on next generation e-readers.

That coalition, which is being spearheaded by Time Inc., includes Condé, Hearst Corp. and other big publishers.

Magazine companies feel current e-readers such as the Amazon Kin dle, while great for books, are not suitable for magazines because they display only in black and white and don’t allow rich media or color ads.

One of the first products of the Condé/Adobe strate gic alliance will be a maga zine application built on the Adobe AIR platform. It will be deployable to an array of devices, from laptops and netbooks to future- generation smartphones to the color electronic slate devices due out next year.

“Certainly, our work with Adobe would not preclude us from joining the venture that is in discussion,” a Condé Nast spokeswoman said. “They are ongoing and very serious.”

Digest digs

The space that will be the new global headquarters of Reader’s Digest Association was known as the Bermuda Triangle of Condé Nast, because so many magazines disappeared after passing through it.

RDA CEO Mary Berner is signing an 11-year sublease for some of Condé’s unused offices at 750 Third Avenue. The building once housed Golf Digest, House & Garden, Cookie, Elegant Bride and Modern Bride. All are defunct except for Golf Digest.

While landlord SL Green is listing the rental price at around $50 a square foot, court documents filed by the bankrupt RDA show it will pay S.I. Newhouse‘s Advance Magazine Publishers, Condé’s parent company, $32.34 per square foot — $3 million a year — for the 86,000-foot space.

RDA has been on its 120-acre site in Chappaqua, NY, since 1939, but still kept the mailing address in Pleasantville, where founders Lila and DeWitt Wallace landed in 1922 shortly after vacating their Greenwich Village launch pad.

The company is moving about 500 of its 650 Chap paqua employees to a 142,000 square- foot fa cility in White Plains, paying $26.31 per foot.

RDA said it will save $4.5 million a year on rent, plus another $6.7 million in upkeep of the grounds which it was leasing after selling a decade ago.

Berner moves back into a building she occupied when she was the president of Fairchild Publications. She resigned in early 2006, after a realignment that made the standalone a division of Condé Nast.

Fairchild is now run by CEO Richard “Mad Dog” Beckman, who will keep two floors at 750 Third Ave. to house Women’s Wear Daily and W.

Time out

On Wednesday Time Inc. got volunteers for buyout packages at Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Time, People and Money. While the number is believed to have fallen short of the downsizing target, there will be no forced layoffs in the week before Thanksgiving, insid ers now say.

The layoffs, if they are necessary, will not come until early December. Enjoy that turkey.

keith.kelly@nypost.com