In your transitional Monday media column: the State of the Media is okay, James O'Keefe may not be a totally trustworthy journalist, hiring at HuffPo, Lou Dobbs is back, Larry King may join The Daily Show, and Mental Floss has a mental owner.
• CBS posted a first-quarter loss as the ad recession took its toll. [THR, NYT]
• News Corp. reported a 70 percent drop in quarterly profits. [LAT, B&C]
• Profit dropped by 46 percent at Warner Music during the same period. [PC]
• Sirius XM posted a $236 million quarterly loss and also announced that its number of subscribers declined for the first time ever. [AP]
• Cablevision plans to "explore" a spinoff of Madison Square Garden. [NYT]
• News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch says he plans to charge readers to access the online content of his newspapers in the near future. [E&P]
• The new Bob Dylan album is No. 1 on the charts this week. [THR]
• Felix Dennis says The Week is for sale. For just $200 million. [Folio]
Wild-haired and possibly murderous publisher Felix Dennis sold Alpha Media—home of Maxim and Blender—to a private equity group last year for about $250 million. Now, hey look, Alpha Media may have to be turned over to its creditors because, you know, advertising revenues are down thanks to the economy. The company is currently "in restructuring talks." So Felix Dennis has a quarter of a billion dollars, and the finance whizzes who paid him have cornered the market on Tila Tequila covers. Felix Dennis is smart. [Folio]
Remember Felix Dennis, the kooky billionaire British magazine publisher who gave us Maxim? He recently admitted (while admittedly drunk) to having "killed a man" in an interview. (He later took it back, post-interview and post-sobering up.) For an new interview in Business Week, Jon Fine asks the tough questions in an attempt to clear up the murder thing: "I'll just be blunt. Have you murdered anybody?"
Maxim publisher Felix Dennis, who grimly admitted to a murder during an interview, keeps trying new and various ways to backtrack. He was drunk! He only kills magazines, ha ha! His latest claim, at a Columbia Journalism event last night: it was all a big prank to sell books! Dennis said it was an April fool's joke. "What [the press] didn't notice was the date," he said. Of course, that disregards the fact that the story actually ran on April 2, and that the interview the story was based on took place months earlier. Quite a bit of forward planning for a raving drunk and possibly murderous lad mag mogul. [BW]. Here's the original passage that started it all:
When eccentric billionaire and Maxim publisher Felix Dennis confessed to killing a man in an interview last week, he quickly realized, once the hangover wore off, that he'd need some expert public relations help with this mess. So he turned to the trusty Drew Kerr, the former Radar publicist who managed to hang on to his Maxim account even as his firm, Four Corners, dwindled to little more than Drew himself and a bag of baby carrots. (Drew was very proud of that baby carrots-sent-to-Gawker stunt). So how does Kerr help the menacing Dennis back out of his murder confession? With an ill-timed joke about how he's only a killer of magazines.
Whoops! Casually admitting to a maybe-murder 25 years after the fact, like billionaire publisher (and poet) Felix Dennis did in an interview published last week, can and does have consequences. "Police in Dennis' hometown of Warwickshire were considering whether or not to question him over his statements in the article," reports Folio. They have not yet decided if they will investigate. [Folio]
Today, we learned from the Times of London that Felix Dennis, Britain's eccentric billionaire entrepreneur and the vice-engaging publisher of Maxim, may have already killed a man. But besides the events of one dark night at the edge of a cliff 25 years ago, did you know that he's also an accomplished poet? Here's one of them, titled, "Polite Notice — To All Health and Safety Facists."
Maxim publisher and very rich man Felix Dennis is an eccentric throwback to the old-school journalism of yore: he also writes poetry and is trying to recreate an ancient forest in England. In an interview with the Times of London, he talks about his old crack habit and how he spent three years trying to "save a young prostitute." Then, a couple of bottles of wine into the evening, he confesses to killing a man, 25 years ago:
"Ink-on-paper magazines" are having a "long slow sunset," according to Felix Dennis, fun-loony former Maxim owner—but they're not making up the cash on the web, in part because publishers just won't lower their standards far enough. Time Inc., the Economist says, "has stuck to its big magazine brands with People.com and with SI.com, its website for Sports Illustrated. The price, competitors say, is that Time Inc cannot do the sort of sarcastic, bitchy celebrity gossip that people like on the internet for fear of tarnishing the brand of People, and therefore cedes first place for entertainment to TMZ.com (also owned by Time Warner), which excels at it." Well, that doesn't mean they're not gonna try to take on TMZ! After all, not only did People hire Alyssa Shelasky, Glamour's former dippy blogette, they hired David Caplan, the mad ungenius behind the now-defunct 24Sizzler, the worst celebugoss site to ever tarnish the internots. So surely they're up to some secret standard-lowering project?
• Felix Dennis will never see a broad as costly as a tree. Also, it takes a lot of dosh to get people drunk enough to listen to your doggerel. [Radar]
• On the other hand, anyone who calls Greg Gutfeld "Darth Vader," must have his finger on some kind of pulse. And, look forward to The Week on the web. [Independent UK]
• Judy McGrath is going to be just fine, thank you very much. Buying MySpace is not the be all and end all of running a media empire. Unless, uh, you're Tom Freston. [NYT]
• ABC News reports news that ABC Newsman considers Matt Drudge the Walter Cronkite of our era, excepting for that fact that Walter Cronkite never falsely accused a presidential aide of wife-beating. [ABC News]
• Bob Woodward saves the good stuff for himself and other newspapers who are willing to buy his book in advance of their sell-dates. [NYT]
• Yahoo! not sexy enough for investors, apparently. [NYP]
• Something is happening to press freedom in Canada. We'd be all up in arms if it weren't, you know, Canada. [NYT]
So just to recap the last 24 hours in magland: AMI shuttered three titles and moved one back to Florida while replacing its EIC, Hachette closed ELLEgirl as a print pub, and we got word that Time Inc. is prepping for yet another round of layoffs. Could there be yet another nail in the coffin of the magazine business this week? Of course there could. Keith Kelly reports today that even one of the few mag execs who seems to be having fun — one with new(ish) products and happy balance sheets — is trying to get out of the game:
· According to the upcoming issue of NY Magazine, Tommy Mottola lost his job through "a combination of lousy record sales, a penchant for presidential-type security, and lack of reverence for his bosses." [Page Six]
· Gotham Editor Jason Oliver Nixon was offered Us Weekly's "Scene and Heard" section, but declined because of the position's high turnover rate. [Page Six]
· William Gibson's new novel features a character who's allergic to brand-name clothing like Tommy Hilfiger, of whose clothes Gibson tells the Black Table's Greg Lindsay, "It is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul." [Page Six]
· Maxim Editor-in-Chief Keith Blanchard's new book, The Deed, is coming out on March 4th. He'll be celebrating tomorrow night at a party at Rehab with Dennis Publishing head Steven Colvin and Simon & Schuster's David Rosenthal. [Page Six]
· Roman Polanksi fled the country in '78 because the judge told Hollywood producer Howard Koch he'd "see that this man never gets out of jail." Koch warned Polanksi. [Cindy Adams]
· Colin Farrell says he was being sarcastic when said that heroin was okay, "when taken in moderation." [NY Daily News]
· A handwriting analyst on GQ Editor Art Cooper, based on a letter written to Stuff Editor Greg Gutfeld's boss, Felix Dennis, suggesting that Dennis fire Gutfeld: "Art has a strong need for affection...He thrives on touching and being touched. Art desires being told that he is loved, every day." [The Word]
