AMY Gross is stepping down as editor-in-chief of O, The Oprah Magazine after an eight-year run.
“I really just feel like it is time,” said Gross, who is 65.
“I’ve been at the same job for eight years,” she said. “That’s longer than I’ve ever been at any job.”
Her previous record was five years as features editor at Vogue. She’s also been the editorial director of Elle and editor-in-chief of Mirabella.
The magazine is a joint venture between Oprah Winfrey‘s Harpo Productions and Hearst Corp., and is widely hailed as magazine publishing’s most successful magazine launch in the past 20 years. Today, it is believed to be the second most profitable magazine in the Hearst empire.
When Gross was hired to replace launch editor Ellen Kunes in July 2000, she was a surprise choice.
The magazine had gotten off to a shaky start as Kunes locked horns with the magazine veterans at Hearst and Winfrey’s team.
For better or worse, Winfrey and her trusted friend Gayle King played a much bigger role in putting together the magazine than many at Hearst had expected.
But whatever tension went on behind the scenes, the magazine turned into an astonishing hit with consumers from the outset.
O, the Oprah Magazine, sold out its first issue with over 1 million copies and had to go back on press for a second printing.
“I took over 2 ½ issues into it,” said Gross. “But it was still in the launch phase.
Like many titles, O, The Oprah Magazine experienced a dip in newsstand sales in the second half of 2007. It was down 3.5 percent to 836,770 single-copy sales, on total circulation of 2,405,177, which was flat compared with the same six-month period a year earlier.
On the ad front last year, it was up 4.2 percent to 2,113.5 ad pages.
As Gross leaves O, The Oprah Magazine, she will be leaving publishing as well.
“I plan to go on retreats,” she said. “I’m not jealous of anything or anybody except people who go on retreats.”
She said she had gone on two three-month retreats after she left Mirabella in 1996, and was actually on the beach, contemplating graduate school and planning to write books when she was contacted by Hearst in mid-2000.
Gross said she has no departure date set.
“I don’t have a last day,” she said. “I promised Oprah I’d stay until we have someone we love.”
Fortune hires
The slumping financial markets haven’t hindered Fortune Managing Editor Andy Serwer from hiring new staff.
The magazine just landed Elizabeth Spiers as a contributing writer.
Spiers first burst on the scene as the launch editor of gawker.com, the snarky, media-centric Web site, where, according to friends, Gawker owner Nick Denton paid her a measly $15,000 a year for the gig. She was also editor of dealbreaker.com
That wasn’t the only big hire this week.
The New York Observer’s Web site reported yesterday that James Bandler is leaving The Wall Street Journal to join Fortune as well.
Bandler’s biggest scoop was breaking the story about for mer GE Chairman Jack Welch‘s affair with Suzy Wetlaufer, at the time the editor of the Harvard Business Review. The disclosure forced Wetlaufer out of a job and eventually triggered a nasty divorce between Welch and then-wife Jane.
Welch and Suzy eventually married and went on to write books together and pen a popular weekly column for BusinessWeek.
“I’ve been a newspaperman for 18 years and wanted to try something different and flex some different muscles,” said Bandler, who started in the Boston bureau of the Journal.
Felix talks
Maverick British publisher Felix Dennis, who recently confessed to killing a man – only to later take it back – has been invited to be the latest speaker in the Delacorte Lecture Series at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The event, next Thursday, will be moderated by the former editorial director of The Nation, Victor Navasky.
Dennis is the man behind the beer-and-babes empire that spawned Maxim, Stuff, which has since folded, and the music magazine Blender.
Maxim and Blender were sold last year to Kent Brownridge and Alpha Media, which is backed by Quadrangle, for around $225 million.
In the US, Dennis’ sole remaining title is The Week, a small but fast-growing magazine that serves as a digest of news stories published around the globe.
Next Thursday, Dennis will ostensibly speak about the success of The Week, and then field questions.
His remarks about having killed a man were made in an interview published by the Times of London. He claimed that the man, who was never named, was abusive to his wife and kids, and after Dennis re peatedly warned him to stop, Dennis said he pushed the man over a cliff to his death.
He is quoted as saying in the interview, “It wasn’t hard.”
Dennis later retracted his story, saying that he had consumed a copious amount of wine during the course of the interview with the Times, and also had been on medication.
Drew Kerr, a spokesman for Dennis in the US, said, “Felix has killed many people with his jokes and he has certainly killed a few magazines along the way – his own and others – but as for human beings, that’s ridiculous.”
What’s sexy
Throughout the week, tens of thousands of mysterious direct mail pieces have been arriving in the mailboxes of media buyers – those young and influential ad agency types who buy commercials and ad pages in the nation’s media.
The super-sized postcards carry bold block-letter phrases such as “Sexy means doing the heavy lifting” or “Sexy means facing the world head on.” They feature a picture of a model on the front. On the flip side, the postcards ask, “What Does Sexy Mean to You?” and invites recipients to log on to sexymeans.com for a chance to win a weekend trip for two in South Beach.
Nowhere on the postcard is the sender identified.
But Media Ink has learned that it is all part of the kickoff of a new seven-figure ad campaign from Cosmopolitan.
On Sunday, the source of the mystery postcards will be revealed with a full-page ad in the New York Times, followed by ads in trade titles Advertising Age and Mediaweek and Web outlets in May.
The ad campaign, by Trey Laird at Laird & Partners, is the first big push for Cosmo since the magazine celebrated its 40th anniversary three years ago.
Cosmopolitan, thanks to the strength of its newsstand sales, remains the most profitable magazine in the Hearst empire, according to its publisher of the past 12 years, Donna Kalajian Lagani.
But it has trailed its longtime rival Glamour at Condé Nast in terms of ad sales for the past several years. Last year, Cosmo defied the industry trend and jumped 4.4 percent in ad pages to 1,817.05, while Glamour, helped by a big boost in corporate ad sales that go to subscriber lists of all of Condé Nast’s magazines, showed a 10.6 percent increase in ad pages to 2,089.56.
Star shines
Turns out that People magazine wasn’t the only celebrity title enjoying a happy start to the year.
Under Editor Candice Trunzo – who re-introduced paying sources for stories, much to the chagrin of corporate Editorial Director Bonnie Fuller – Star magazine is also on the rise.
After suffering through a dismal circulation picture last year, in which the magazine twice dropped its rate base, it has now posted growth in 2008, according to the latest Rapid Report data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Through March 24, Star has been averaging 716,000 copies sold on newsstands, compared with 704,000 a year earlier, a nearly 2 percent gain.
People’s was up about 5 percent.
“Our circulation picture is good,” insisted David Leckey, Star’s executive vice president of marketing.
He said the company rolled back the rate base to 1,250,000 as of January and said, “That’s where we are going to keep it.” A year ago, the rate base was 1.5 million.
The company has had big sellers chronicling the travails of Jamie Lynn Spears.
On Jan. 7, it sold 783,000 copies on newsstands with “Jamie Lynn’s Big Lie,” which wondered if Casey Aldridge is the father of her unborn child.
On Feb. 4, it sold 781,000 with a cover that hyped that Spears was giving up her baby, and on Feb. 25 it sold 771,000 copies with a story about Jamie Lynn’s big sister Britney and Adnan Ghalib getting married in Mexico – which apparently wasn’t true.