A trio of Conde Nast top editors – Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, GQ’s Art Cooper and David Remnick of The New Yorker – have joined forces to keep legendary lensman Harry Benson from jumping to Tina Brown’s new Talk magazine.
Benson was on assignment in Cuba last week and could not be reached, but Conde Nast insiders confirmed the deal, which could be announced as early as today.
Basically, it is a two-year, six-figure deal – in which all three editors have agreed to split the cost.
Benson had already been routinely shooting for Vanity Fair and GQ but now adds The New Yorker to the mix.
Now that he’s shooting for a weekly, he plans to drop People, where he’s been listed as a contributing editor for years but who has done relatively little work for the Time Inc. weekly since Carol Wallace began editing the mag a year ago. He’s expected to continue snapping for Life.
But the war for talent is only beginning to heat up as Brown seeks to sign up a half dozen top name writers to add glitz to Talk’s masthead before its September debut.
The next name to show up on the list is expected to be Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. a Harvard professor who has a contract with The New Yorker that expires in the fall.
Gates was traveling yesterday and could not be reached.
Another name to surface on the rumor mill was New York Times reporter Monique Yazigi, who writes for the Metro section. Asked recently if she was jumping, in negotiations or had been contacted by Tina, Yazigi insisted “no, no and no.”
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Gerald de Roquemaurel, the big man at Hachette Filipacchi Medias in Paris was in New York yesterday, kicking off the search in earnest for a successor to David Pecker, CEO of the American-based magazine subsidiary that publishes Elle, Woman’s Day, Premiere and John Kennedy’s George. Pecker said last week he is jumping ship at the end of March to be CEO at supermarket tabloid publisher American Media.
Meanwhile, the first talent to leave in the post-Pecker era looks like it has just taken place. Steven F. Binder, publisher of Mirabella, where ad pages soared 33.9 percent last year to 481 pages, is jumping to Conde Nast where he will be associate publisher of Allure. Allure could use the help. It was off 2.8 percent in pages last year to 1,332 and according to Media Industry Newsletter is off 17.3 percent in the first quarter of 1998 under newly installed publisher Erica Bartman.
Binder said he had worked closely with Pecker, but the deal to jump had actually been in the works for weeks. “I wanted to work for a bigger book and felt working at Conde Nast was the next step for my career,” said Binder.
Meanwhile, de Roquemaurel is hunting for bigger game to run Hachette. Among the names that are being talked up as possible replacements for Pecker: Jack Kliger, a senior vice president at Parade, Greg Coleman, a executive vice president at Reader’s Digest, Cathy Viscardi Johnston, an executive vice president at Conde Nast, and Michael Clinton, chief marketing officer at Conde Nast.
Inside candidates include chief operating officer John Fennell, group publisher John Miller and top advertising executive Nick Matarazzo.
De Roquemaurel is expected to strategize with top executives and head back to Paris today.
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Nuala O’Faolainshould be able to throw quite a St. Patrick’s Day bash in Dublin if she so desires. The Irish Times op-ed writer just sold her first novel, “My Everything Always,” to the Riverhead books imprint of Penguin Putnam for an estimated $1 million.
Riverhead had to beat out Henry Holt, which published O’Faolain’s 1998 memoir, “Are You Somebody,” about her life as a young girl growing up in rural Ireland.
Riverhead was the underbidder on that original book, which became a best seller for Holt, and was not about to make the same mistake twice.
“It’s not written – she’s going to take a year to write it,” said Cindy Spiegel, co-editorial director of Riverhead. The book was brokered by agent Sydelle Kramer.
Basically, the novel is centered around a passionate middle age woman in contemporary Ireland who is doing research into events in famine era Ireland around 1847.
The historical portion of the novel is based on a true story that O’Faolain uncovered about a real divorce case from the era involving a Anglo-Irish landlord, and the fling that his wife had with a local Irish farm hand.