Travel + Leisure raids Condé Nast Traveler

Pilar Guzmán, who was tapped from Martha Stewart Living last August to jump-start Condé Nast Traveler, has lost her deputy editor only 10 months after he joined.

Jeffries Blackerby landed in November from Vogue to fill the No. 3 job on the masthead.

He is now jumping to arch rival Travel+Leisure at Time Inc., which named Nathan Lump to succeed longtime editor Nancy Novogrod only last month.

Blackerby will fill the number two slot as executive editor of Travel + Leisure.

It’s not the first time Lump has poached Blackerby. When Lump was editor of “T,” he had wooed Blackerby from Departures.

Guzmán fired most of the senior level staff shortly after she arrived — as part of her attempt to jump start the title and go bring in more lifestyle features.

Guzmán’s first re-designed Traveler was the March issue that featured a non-destination cover adorned with supermodel Christy Turlington.

In the recent September issue, another model, Liya Kebede, graces the cover.

Veering away from destinations seems as something of a gamble in titles that are so specialized.

But it seems to have hit a responsive chord with advertisers, with ad pages up 6 percent through September to 653.

That keeps pace with the 6.6 percent ad page jump from Travel+Leisure.

But reaction on the consumer front suggests readers have not been as quick to embrace the change.

Although neither magazine is huge on newsstands, T+L saw its single copy sales jump 15.6 percent to 29,321 — out of total circulation of 958,749 — according to the Alliance for Audited Media for the first half of the year.

Traveler, meanwhile, lost its single copy advantage, dropping 9 percent in the first six months of the year (which included four of the six redesigned issues) to only 27,850 — out of total circulation of 813,747.

When mobile and laptop/desktop traffic was added into the mix, Condé Nast Traveler had more ground to make up with a total audience of 3.5 million unique visitors in August, up 7.7 percent from a year earlier, according to Magazine Media 360.

Rival T+L racked up an audience score of 6.7 million in August — one of the last issues overseen by Novogrod, up 21.9 percent from 2013.