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MAGAZINE EDITORS HIT THE ROAD IN CORPORATE SHAKEUP
Last updated: 1:58 pm
July 9, 2008
Posted: 3:50 am
July 9, 2008
EDITORS are taking the hits in the latest rounds of restructuring that are shaking the magazine world.
Friends said that Erik Torkells, editor at Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, has resigned in the face of a coming restructuring inside the Washington Post Co.-owned magazine.
He's leaving next week.
Torkells swept to power in a realignment that led to the ouster of most of founder Arthur Frommer's people from the magazine's masthead five years ago.
The latest restructuring actually began a year ago when Harold Shain was moved from president of Newsweek to CEO of Budget Travel, which the Washington Post Co. bought eight years ago from magazine entrepreneur Don Welsh.
Shain is exiting by the end of the year with a severance package.
Meanwhile, as part of the soon-to-be revealed realignment, Budget Travel Publisher Nancy Telliho is expected to move into Shain's old office, and she's expected to search for a new editor.
Shell shock
Folks inside Condé Nast are still reeling over the shutdown of Golf for Women.
And the word inside the company is that Condé Nast's satellite offices at 485 Lexington Ave. have become the new house of horrors.
Last year, House & Garden was shut down just a year after moving its offices into that building. This week it was Golf for Women.
"If any magazine gets moved into here, it probably means they are getting ready to shut down," said one source.
The glitzy headquarters at 4 Times Square is where Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are housed.
But because that space quickly filled up, Condé Nast has been forced to take on auxiliary space all over town.
Condé Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. had been eyeing the West Side rail yards and other sites to try to eventually get all of his magazines under one roof again.
If he keeps shutting down unprofitable titles, the problem may solve itself.
"Everybody is freaked out about the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2009," said one insider.
Susan Reed's departure from Condé Nast will probably go down as a textbook case of how not to do things.
