In the publishing world, it’s not Black Friday or the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting that officially kicks off the holiday season, but rather Condé Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr.‘s annual bash at the Four Seasons Restaurant for his top editors, publishers and executives.
Often seen as a bellwether of who’s in or out among the Nasties, many in publishing pay particularly close attention to who’s seated near Newhouse.
This year, of course, all anyone wanted to know was where Joanne Lipman, the embattled editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Portfolio, was seated.
And in what can only be seen as a signal from the taciturn Newhouse that she still has his support, Lipman was seated at his elbow at the main table – which this year was table No. 4.
But there was treachery in the ranks!
Though Lipman was smiling – with some describing her as positively giddy over her plumb spot at the right hand of Si – she was apparently unaware that her superstar writer, Dan Roth, who had been poached from Fortune with much fanfare, was at that very moment getting ready to jump ship to Wired.
By the time she returned from the lunch, it was a done deal. Wired Editor Chris Anderson, who didn’t even have that great a seat at table No. 3, had swooped in and poached Roth to be his star writer.
Later back at her office, Lipman tried to keep a stiff upper lip.
“It’s not surprising, since he’s been wooed non-stop since he came here,” she said in an e-mail. “It’s a good opportunity for him, and I’m glad to see him land at a sister publication.”
Though Roth couldn’t be reached for comment, a friend said that Portfolio has become a magazine with more newspaper DNA, and he’s a magazine guy.
Returning to the who-sat-where derby, Lipman’s table also boasted Graydon Carter, the proprietor of the trendy Waverly Inn, whose day job is editing Vanity Fair magazine.
Anna Wintour, the Vogue editrix, was smiling this year without her trademark sunglasses as she left the restaurant with Vogue Publisher Tom Florio.
She shared a table with Anderson, who flew in from San Francisco specifically for the lunch, and Architectural Digest Publisher Giulio Capua.
Portfolio President and Publisher David Carey, the man who many say is responsible for ringing up all those 100-plus ad-page tallies, was relegated to the fairly nondescript table No. 7, which was devoid of upper-echelon executives.
Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend sat with Glamour Publisher Bill Wackermann, causing some to speculate that Glamour, set to have its best year since the Mary Berner era of the late 1990s, had overtaken Vogue as the company’s top money-making magazine.
Sources say it may all come down to the January ad-page tallies which count in the current fiscal year.
The company was said to have had the best year ever in its history, and posted its sixth consecutive year of double-digit ad-page growth.
However, Newhouse, in an uncharacteristic move, devoted a large part of his lunchtime pep talk to real estate.
The company currently anchors the Condé Nast Tower in Times Square, but its 4,000 US-based employees have outgrown that space and are now dispersed across six sites in Manhattan. To consolidate again, they are eyeing the West Side railyards for a future home.
Newhouse said that any move out of Times Square is more than a decade away.
“If we move, it wouldn’t be until 2019,” Newhouse said. But then he added, “Eleven years in real estate in New York is the blink of an eye.”
The crowd that attended the lunch was larger than ever at 96 people – and some insiders were grumbling that the event had gotten too big and lost a lot of its cachet.
Said one insider, “They have all these corporate people there. They should really only have editors and publishers.” keith.kelly@nypost.com