Supermarket tabloid National Enquirer is returning its editorial operations to New York City, but its Editor-in-Chief Tony Frost won’t be coming north — he has been pushed is out of the job and will be staying put in Boca Raton, Fla., The Post has learned.
Frost’s ouster comes months after an embarrassing February Enquirer story that falsely claimed the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman had a gay lover.
Insiders claim the Hoffman story cost Frost his job, but the tabloid’s publisher, American Media Inc., denies there is a connection between the two.
Frost, who has led the famous supermarket tabloid for four years, will stay at AMI and edit some of its smaller tabloids, including the Boca Raton-based Globe and Examiner.
Those titles will remain in Florida.
Dylan Howard, the Australian-born journalist who was already running AMI’s RadarOnline as editorial director, was named editor-in-chief of the Enquirer as well as vice president of editorial at AMI.
Stunned Enquirer staffers in AMI’s offices got the news from CEO David Pecker late Friday via conference call. Pecker answered no questions, before turing the call over to HR, sources said.
“The strategy behind this move, is, let’s face it, content has changed,” Howard told Media Ink. “It’s time to re-engineer the way we look at the business,” he said. “I want more vibrancy and more collaboration” between Radar and the Enquirer.
Howard stopped short of saying the two staffs would be combined.
About 20-to-30 people in the Boca Raton office are expected to lose their jobs at the Enquirer, sources said. About that total may land jobs at other AMI titles in Florida.
When AMI is fully staffed in New York, AMI may have a net gain in jobs, Howard said.
The industrywide downturn in newsstand sales is more worrisome at AMI than in other companies because the Enquirer is responsible for generating over $100 million in retail sales and AMI relies on circulation for the majority of its revenue.
“I think Pecker is doing this for two reasons,” said one insider. “One, he wanted to cut costs, and two, he wanted to put the Enquirer in someone else’s hands because the Philip Seymour Hoffman thing hurt its credibility.”
In that screw-up, the Enquirer interviewed a person that they thought was Hoffman’s friend, David Bar Katz.
Unfortunately, the person they interviewed who claimed to be Hoffman’s gay lover was an imposter.
The real David Bar Katz filed a $50-million libel suit that the Enquirer settled, in part, with a full-page apology ad in the New York Times that retracted the false story.
AMI also agreed to fund a foundation set up by Bar Katz that will award an annual $45,000 prize to an aspiring playwright.
But some of Frost’s defenders said that constant staff cutbacks at the Enquirer has hurt the tabloid’s ability to track down stories such as the 2010 scoop about the affair Sen. John Edwards, who was eyeing a White House run, was having with Rielle Hunter. The two had a secret love child.
A dozen reporters spent months on that story — and it earned the Enquirer a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.
AMI in the David Pecker era has frequently migrated its titles up and down the East Coast — or across the country from West Coast to East Coast.
Star has moved at least four times.
AMI’s other celebrity titles have gone through upheavals as well. Ryan Pienciak was let ago as OK! editor-in-chief at the end of 2013 and the position was left unfilled. Last week, both publications got the news that the staffs would be combined and Star Editor-in-Chief James Heidenry will now be in charge of both.
Insiders said a half-dozen people lost jobs in that combination.
The Enquirer is actually returning to a long-forgotten home. It traces its roots to a New York City afternoon daily called the New York Examiner — whose biggest claim to fame was that it was the first paper to report that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
By the time Generoso Pope Jr. took it over in 1952, its circulation had tumbled to just 17,000 a day. The $75,000 he paid for it was reportedly partially funded by loans from the New York mobster Frank Costello.
After Pope introduced it into national supermarket chains, he rechristened it the National Enquirer and began filling it with less gore and more service, celebrity and political gossip — and, of course, news from psychics and about UFO sightings.
Pope moved the newspaper to a compound in Lantana, Fla., in 1971. By the time it snapped Elvis Presley in his coffin in 1977, its weekly circulation was over 6 million.
When Pope died it was sold to private investors in 1989 for $412 million.
After its takeover by Pecker in 1999, it did make one ill-fated move from Florida back to New York City.
Weekly circulation has slumped to 520,796, down 9.1 percent on the most recent six-month reporting period ending Dec. 31. Most industry observers think there will never be a newsstand rebound.
“It is critically important that everyone we recruit has a skill set that can translate to print and digital,” said Howard, who insisted scoops and exclusives are still the heart of the tabloid.
AMI said its circulation dropped only 3 percent after a 25 percent cover price hike, to $4.99, earlier this year, but it had an 18 percent increase in revenue thanks to the price increase.
The move into the existing AMI facilities in NYC is slated for mid-June. Insiders said that if past moves are any guide, virtually nobody will make the move from Florida to NYC — even if offered.
Howard declined to divulge how many would be cut loose, but he obviously is remaking the staff.
“Recruiting is well underway,” he said.