Condé Nast reheats Gourmet as a digital app
Conde Nast is packaging warmed-over leftovers to foodies. Gourmet is being brought back as Gourmet Live, a digital content app that the company envisions growing into a $20 million-a-year operation.
“We shut down the magazine in October,” said Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend. “We didn’t shut down the brand.”
Unlike most digital operations, which scrape by on modest advertising support and garner only a few million unique visitors, Gourmet Live is seen as a way to draw revenue from consumers attracted by social networking possibilities on the foodie app.
Of the $20 million in revenues projected for Gourmet Live, Townsend predicts only about $1 million will come from sponsors or advertisers. The other $19 million is expected to come from paying consumers.
“The consumer is front and center in our strategy,” said Townsend, speaking about Gourmet Live as well as the company’s other Web businesses, which contribute only about 3 percent of Condé Nast’s overall revenues.
He called Gourmet Live, which is expected to debut in the fourth quarter of 2010, “a work in progress.”
Robert Sauerberg, the group president of Condé Nast Consumer Marketing, is heading up the project in its business development stage. He said, “Consumers are literally hungry for food content and are willing to pay for it.”
How much they pay remains to be seen. Condé Nast has made more than a few false starts in the digital world over the past 10 years. It has recruited Michael Wolf, the former president of MTV Networks and previously a media consultant with Booz Allen and McKinsey, as a consultant. He’s the president of a new media consulting firm, Activate, which lists Condé Nast as one of its first major clients.
Newsday offer
Newsday owner Cablevision, after claiming the pay pact that was rejected was its “last, best and final offer,” has added a tiny sweetener to a new deal that will be voted on by 1,100 unionized workers on Sunday.
The tentative pact with Local 406 of the Graphic Communications Council of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters contains the same pay cuts that were rejected by more than a 2-to-1 margin (331 against, vs. 139 for) back on June 6.
Essentially, the pact now on the table contains a provision that Cablevision/Newsday will make a defined-benefit pension contribution equal to 1 percent of each worker’s salary at the end of the proposed three-year contract in 2013.
Most of the employees would see their pay reduced by 5 percent, which would remain in effect for the contract’s three-year life. All six bargaining units are currently operating without contracts, which began expiring on a rolling basis from late March to May 1.
If the latest proposal is rejected, the union has already asked union members to give a strike authorization vote the following day, on June 28.
Newsday publisher Terry Jimenez sent a letter June 10 that told union leaders after the last pay pact was rejected that it was the Long Island daily’s “last, best and final offer.” Jimenez gave the union until 5 p.m. on July 5 to accept that agreement or Newsday would consider the negotiations at “impasse” and would begin imposing parts of the rejected deal including forced pay cuts and dismissals.
Conde exits
The exodus continues to pick up steam at Condé Nast. One day after 24-year veteran Tom Florio, a senior vice president and publications director of Vogue, resigned last Thursday, he was followed out the door by Vogue Associate Publisher Lottie Oakley.
Oakley, who finishes up this week, said she is operating under a nondisclosure agreement at the moment and could not yet reveal many details about her new gig.
“I will be partnering with people who are not at Condé Nast. It will be a new media venture that will not be competitive with Condé Nast,” she said. And she added that she is not joining forces with Florio, who apparently doesn’t have anything lined up yet. Florio told The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to either buy or invest in his own company.
Patrick O’Connell, the veteran public relations man for Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, is also finishing up this week. He said he wants to go into charity and philanthropic work after 12 years as Wintour’s mouthpiece.
Elissa Lumley, who had been doing p.r. for Men’s Vogue before it was shut down more than a year ago, and was recently in volved with W and Archi tectural Digest, is also fin ishing up this week.
She is going to join Richard “Mad Dog” Beckman at e5 Global Media as the executive di rector of corporate commu nications for the company that includes Billboard, the Adweek Group and Tinseltown trade The Hollywood Reporter.