Kelly Killoren Bensimon, now in her fourth season on “Real Housewives of New York City,” is going to return to her roots in the publishing world with a weekly column in amNew York, the freebie newspaper.
“It will be a little bit of everything,” said SoHo resident Bensimon, “fashion, food, accessories, restaurants, sports, the arts.”
When she was married to former Hachette Filipacchi Creative Director Gilles Bensimon, she was the editor of now-defunct Elle Accessories. Bensimon said she got her start as a $100-a-week writer for Hamptons Magazine and was one of the people working on Gotham in the early days. “This is my first love,” she said of the writing world.
She and her ex must have stayed on pretty good terms as he shot her nude pictorial in the March Playboy.
The column starts May 5, a few days before celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan also begins a weekly column for the paper, chronicling the social events of the city.
They were both hired by publisher Paul Turcotte, rather than the editor. For the past year, he’s been trying to rebuild the battered ad base of the paper, owned by Newsday parent company Cablevision.
Florio fade
Tom Florio, the one-time senior vice president in charge of Vogue, is apparently winding down his time at Ted Forstmann‘s IMG, the sports marketing and modeling agency behemoth.
When he left Condé Nast in June 2010 after 25 years. he said he wanted to become CEO of his own company.
In late September, he instead surfaced with the title of senior adviser for fashion to the office of the chairman of IMG. He reported directly to Chairman Forstmann and was said to be searching for “high-margin” products in the fashion and design worlds.
“The opportunities to work with these creative resources in multimedia and digital platforms are endless,” said Florio in a statement at the time.
But now it looks like that time is not as endless as first imagined. We reached out to Florio and he said, “I agreed to consult for another six months.”
But it sounds like his portfolio has been narrowed and will end before Dec. 31.
An IMG spokesman did not return a call by press time.
The good news for Florio? It means the new consulting gig may carry him past the non-compete portion of his former Condé Nast contract, which is believed to have been for one year.
Gawker hit
Gossip fans have been staying away from Gawker Media’s snarky sites in droves since Chairman Nick Denton unveiled a sweeping redesign in February. More than two months since the dramatic redesign drew readers’ ire, visitors and page views have not returned to their pre-redesign levels.
How big the falloff has been at Gawker.com, and siblings gizmodo.com, lifehacker.com, jezebel.com, deadspin.com and others depends largely on whose numbers one looks at.
Nicholas Jackson, writing on Atlantic.com yesterday, said “the numbers are worse than anyone anticipated,” citing Gawker’s internal traffic numbers.
Jackson also cites numbers from TechCrunch, quoting Quantcast, which found the numbers for Gawker.com were cut nearly in half since the redesign — down to just over 500,000 unique visitors so far in April from over 2 million unique visitors per month in January. That’s a 75 percent drop.
Comscore.com, another widely followed Web tracking service, is also showing that Gawker Media numbers are way down over the past two months. Gawker Media’s eight sites had 14,670,000 unique visitors in March, down 35 percent from the 19,944,000 that it recorded in January before the redesign, comScore said.
One industry executive said of Gawker’s recent travails: “I think it was simply a bad redesign. . .well-intended and necessary, but not effectively done. Why do the redesign at all, aside from Denton getting bored with the snarky blog format that he helped champion?”
Web pricing has been under enormous downward pressure. Some concede pricing has dropped by 50 percent in three years.
Gawker in its redesign appeared to be trying to find a way to keep heavily- trafficked stories near the top of its sites to attract more viewers. The redesign was also apparently aimed at making the site more friendly for video adver tising, which commands higher priced ads.
Denton said he was pulling in close to 100 million page views a month before the redesign. He concedes that it tumbled to 75 million at its low point, but insists it has rebounded to 93 million.
Said Denton: “Gawker and most of our sites are now less than 10 percent off their earlier page views, not nearly as cataclysmic as some were hoping.”