Keith J. Kelly

Keith J. Kelly

Media

Dr. Oz to get a new title: cover boy

The doctor will soon be in.

Hearst has shipped to the printers the debut edition of its newest title, Dr. Oz The Good Life.

The first cover, when it lands on newsstands Feb. 4, will feature Dr. Mehmet Oz, sources said.

By taking the cover himself, the health and fitness guru is following the trail blazed by other eponymous magazines — including those produced by Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Rachael Ray.

Not clear is how many covers the good doctor will grace.

Some celebrities, most famously Rosie O’Donnell, found it was a grind to appear on every issue of a magazine once it moves to monthly frequency.

Oprah often shot three covers at a time to avoid the bother.

The hope inside the Hearst Tower is that, on the business side, Oz takes up some of the slack created by a drop-off in ad sales and circulation at Oprah’s title — a decline tied to the talk show queen ending her successful show.

While O, The Oprah Magazine still holds the Hearst record of moving from launch to profit in the shortest time, last year its ad pages dropped below 1,000 — to 991, down 14 percent, its third straight annual decline, according to Media Industry Newsletter.

O’s newsstand sales dropped 22.7 percent in the first half of 2013 — to 346,799.

Oz is one of the more ambitious rollouts ever for Hearst, with 350,000 copies being distributed to newsstands and another 450,000 copies distributed free to subscribers of other Hearst titles.

In his year-end letter, Hearst Magazines President David Carey mentioned a “winning year,” for the division of Hearst Corp. — but the unit apparently missed topping the all-time record for profits racked up in the pre-recession year of 2007.

The letter to the 11,000 worldwide magazine employees only singled out Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire as titles that achieved record profitability.

Good Housekeeping, once the second-most profitable title in the stable, saw its ad pages slip 8.5 percent. It imported Jane Francisco from Canadian magazine Chatelaine to try to inject new life into the brand.

While the privately held company doesn’t reveal numbers, it is estimated to have worldwide sales of $3 billion with about $1.8 billion coming from the US.

Carey said that Cosmopolitan — estimated to still be the most profitable magazine in the company — reached 20 million unique visitors in December. That’s double January 2013’s total.