Vanity Fair

Condé Nast Knows Faded Glory Is Not in Style

“Unless we want to look like a museum, we had to change and change pretty radically,” he added.

For the past year, Ms. Wintour has been focused on the next step of the process: turning seven of Condé Nast’s biggest publications — Vogue, GQ, Wired, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler and Glamour — into global brands, each under one leader, cutting costs and streamlining the sharing of content across both print magazines and digital platforms.

“Instead of having 27 Vogues or 10 Vogues go after one story, we have one global Vogue go after it,” Ms. Wintour said. “So it’s more like a global newsroom with different hubs.”

The switch in focus from local to global has not gone down well everywhere. Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, filleted the plan as “suicidal” in an interview in August with The Times of London.

“Obviously there are some stories that work, particularly if you think about fashion, that’s a global language, and music, so there are stories that will work across all territories and then those that absolutely won’t,” Ms. Wintour said. “We’re very aware of that.”

Ms. Wintour is also ensuring that there are unlikely to be any more Anna Wintours — no more imperial editors in chief each with their own fiefs, a job Ms. Wintour herself helped create as a stylish but exacting gatekeeper of fashion and culture. The brands are now run by “global editorial directors,” most of whom are based in New York, with regional heads of content reporting to them.

“Before, you created stories for publication and it came out once a month and that was great,” she said, describing the old domain of an editor in chief. Now the global editorial directors and heads of content are working across platforms that include “digital, video, short and long form, social, events, philanthropic endeavors, membership, consumer, e-commerce,” Ms. Wintour said.

“You touch so many different worlds,” she added. “Honestly, who wouldn’t want that job?”

In the midst of the change at Condé Nast, plenty of people decided they didn’t.

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Coinbase Could Lead a Crypto Charge Into Public Markets

How big can a SPAC get?

The answer, in short, is as big as a financier can dream. This week, a blank-check firm that raised $500 million in its I.P.O. got $4 billion in additional funding from private investors to merge with Grab in a deal worth $40 billion. That’s a difference of nearly 8,000 percent between the cash in the SPAC and the value of the company that will take over its listing. It’s the largest ratio on record, according to data from SPAC Research.

The size of a SPAC is only loosely related to that of the target it seeks. Additional funding these companies arrange alongside a merger allows them to take on bigger targets, and the bigger the target, the less dilutive the SPAC sponsor’s stake in the combined entity, making it more attractive to other shareholders. So far this year, the value of announced SPAC mergers has been more than 800 percent larger, on average, than the cash in the SPACs; that’s up from roughly 600 percent last year and 400 percent in 2019.

More than 400 SPACs now seeking acquisitions are together sitting on $140 billion, so applying the current ratio implies a potential deal value of $1.3 trillion, roughly the value of all M.&A. deals in the U.S. last year. (Using Grab’s outsize ratio, it would be a whopping $11 trillion.)

The new media barbell

Jon Kelly, a former Vanity Fair editor, plans to launch a new media company with an unusual business model, Ed Lee and DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch report for The Times. The venture has raised about $7 million from investors, including the private equity firm TPG. Notably, it will pay its yet-to-be-named writers a portion of the subscription fees they personally generate, creating a compromise between the dominant business models of old and new media companies.

Upstart media brands are betting on star power to drive subscriptions. Mr. Kelly’s new venture, which may be called Puck, the name of an American humor magazine of the late 1800s and early 1900s, plans to use its revenue-sharing model to attract big-name writers. The push to “monetize individuality” has attracted increasingly high-profile figures to new platforms: Substack offers lucrative contracts to select writers who use it to launch newsletters.

Established companies rely more on prestige, breadth and experience. The largest media companies lean on their brands to attract both talent and subscribers.

It gets murky in the middle. Digital media players like BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media and Group Nine rely more on ads than subscriptions, and they’ve stumbled as the pandemic has ravaged that industry. In an increasingly crowded, differentiated field, they’re trying to bulk up via mergers or go public to raise funds and satisfy early investors.

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Catch up: Former Condé Nast editor plans a Vanity Fair for the Substack era.

April 15, 2021

A former editor at Vanity Fair has been working to create a new digital publication, in which writers will share in subscription revenue — Vanity Fair meets Substack. The new company behind the publication, Heat Media, hopes to unveil it in the coming months, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The start-up is partly the brainchild of Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair. One of the backers is the private equity firm TPG, which would take three seats on the Heat Media board, the people said. Another investor is 40 North, a related investment arm of Standard Industries, a global industrials company, the people said. Heat Media has raised around $7 million so far, according to the people.
Kimberly Godwin, a veteran CBS News executive, was named the next president of ABC News on Wednesday, making her the first Black woman to lead a major broadcast network’s news division. Ms. Godwin succeeds James Goldston, who announced his departure from ABC in January. She will begin in her job in early May. Ms. Godwin most recently served as CBS’s executive vice president of news.

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Former Condé Nast Editor Plans a Vanity Fair for the Substack Era

A former editor at Vanity Fair has been working for more than a year to create a digital publication with a business twist: Its writers will share in subscription revenue.

Think of it as Vanity Fair meets Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has attracted big-name authors.

The new company behind the publication, Heat Media, hopes to unveil it in the coming months, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The start-up is partly the brainchild of Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair who worked under its previous editor in chief, Graydon Carter.

If all goes to plan, the start-up’s contributors would include writers whose contacts include the power elite of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington and Wall Street. An annual subscription would cost $100 and could include a daily newsletter, a website and access to events, the people said. The publication does not yet have a name. One under consideration is Puck, the name of an American humor magazine of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

invest in the “geek culture” website Fandom, which recently acquired gaming website Focus Multimedia. Last year, a TPG affiliate acquired the soccer site Goal.com, and the firm recently announced plans to acquire a stake in DirectTV.

The cash from the two firms would give the start-up some security at a time when some of the biggest players in digital publishing, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox Media and Group Nine, have stumbled as the pandemic ravaged the ad industry.

Mr. Kelly’s business partners are Joe Purzycki, a founder of the podcasting company Luminary Media, and Max Tcheyan, who helped build the sports site The Athletic, the people said.

Two people who have seen a pitch deck on the company’s plans said that its potential competitors are the Washington news site Axios, the tech news site The Information and Vanity Fair.

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