There’s a new round of tumult in the celebrity magazine world.
Alexis Chiu, the celeb-friendly writer who resigned as a senior writer at Time Inc.’s People last week, is heading to Bauer Publishing’s In Touch in a very senior job.
Bauer yesterday confirmed the defection, telling Media Ink that Dan Wakeford, the current editor-in-chief of Life & Style, is now going to also become editor-in-chief of Bauer’s larger circulation In Touch title.
Bauer Publications late yesterday confirmed that Chiu is indeed the new In Touch executive editor.
Still not clear is the fate of Deborah Baer, who is an executive editor at In Touch. She had been the acting editor ever since former Editor-In-Chief Michelle Lee left for Hollywood.com in January. Lee’s job atop the masthead was technically never filled.
Life & Style is among the few publications in the hard-hit celebrity category that has been posting year-over-year gains in newsstand sales.
Baer could not be reached, but sources say she is worried that the end is near for her at Bauer.
While Chiu wrote the recent People cover story crowning Beyoncé as the “World’s Most Beautiful Woman,” she is taking on a bigger management challenge — which is why Wakeford is going to be working with her.
In a piece of celebrity irony, it was In Touch that triggered the bust-up of Sandra Bullock and her husband, motorcycle builder Jesse James, when it published a story in March 2010 detailing a fling James had with tattoo artist Michelle “
Bombshell” McGee.
The couple divorced later that year.
Chiu was the writer at People who wrote the Bullock cover story telling her side of the break-up.
Calls to Chiu’s former phone at People yielded a message saying that she has left the company and to contact her on her cell phone.
She had not returned a call by presstime.
Sebastian Raatz, a Bauer executive vice president who has, at times, clashed with some of the editors, confirmed the arrival of Chiu and the promotion of Wakeford. “We are pleased to announce Dan and Alexis’ new role.”
Chiu was said to be vacationing in Mexico in between jobs and won’t take up the new post for another week and a half.
Hot in Cleveland
David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, speaking at an Adweek Next Tech conference yesterday, said that the rise of the digital entrepreneur has upended forever the way traditional media giants do business.
“We have to meet the entrepreneur head on,” said Carey. “It used to be if you created an ink on paper challenger, it would take a lot of time and a lot of money. If you create a digital challenger it takes a shorter period of time and not a lot of money. And you don’t have to be based in a shiny tower in New York City, you could be based in Cleveland and compete.
“Our competition is not Time Warner across the street or Condé Nast,” he said. “Our competition is the people who set out every day to bring down the big battleships.”
Carey said in the past, there were three revenue streams that editors and publishers had to worry about. Today, he said, “there are probably nine or 10.”
He said that mobile devices now account for 16 percent of the page views for Hearst magazines, up from only 3 percent a year ago. He expects that number to rise to at least 32 percent of the Web traffic in the next year.
On the subject of tablets, Carey said Hearst is “trying to train consumers in the early stages of this” to pay for digital subscriptions.
The company’s focus so far in that realm has been “selling incremental paid subscriptions,” he said.
Carey noted that Hearst has sold more than 600,000 paid subscriptions via tablet devices.
Jannot jumps
The high-level departures from Swedish-owned Bonnier Corp. continue to pick up steam.
Mark Jannot, who was editorial director of the Bonnier Technology Group, which includes Popular Science, Popular Photography and several other titles, is gonig to be the new Chief Content Officer for Reader’s Digest enthusiast brands, which includes Taste of Home and The Family Handyman.
La shake-up
La Nación, the second-largest daily newspaper in Argentina, formally took control of ImpreMedia, parent of El Diario/La Prensa in New York and La Opinión in LA and began shaking things up.
CEO Monica Lozano seems to have ceded much of the power to new COO Francisco Seghezzo, who moved into the corporate suite in the Brooklyn offices on April 30.