Mag sale Lag-arderes
The Lagardére sale of all its ti tles outside of France to the Hearst Corp. for nearly $1 billion is going to drag on even longer than expected.
On Monday, the Paris-based media giant is expected to announce that the deal won’t be finalized until the third quarter of this year.
A tentative pact, calling for Hearst to pay roughly $953 million, is expected to be inked in March, allowing time for the company to give the mandated notices to French workers’ councils.
But it is going to take several more months after the tentative deal is finalized to get approval from European regulatory authorities. Lagardére’s Elle, which it will license to Hearst as part of the deal, is a direct competitor of Hearst-owned Harper’s Bazaar.
When the 100-title deal is finally done, it will make Hearst the No. 2 magazine/media publisher in the world, behind Time Inc., but Hearst will have a larger international presence than Time.
Paul Luthringer, a spokesman for Hearst, said only, “Negotiations continue.”
NewsBeast
The NewsBeast is almost ready to fly.
The Newspaper Guild yesterday came to terms on a new contract that clears one of the last hurdles facing the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
The deal will add about 50 Daily Beast non-supervisory editorial people — who worked non-union for Beast under Barry Diller’s IAC/InteractiveCorp — to the roughly 88 Guild-covered employees remaining at Newsweek.
The pact amounts to one of the largest one-day increases in Guild membership in decades. It also helps to add digital-savvy writers and designers to a union that has been associated with the ink-stained journalists of yesteryear. The union had seen its ranks wane through the decades as newspaper staffs shrank and many papers went bankrupt or folded.
“We want to be part of the digital present,” said Bill O’Meara, president of The Newspaper Guild, who said the negotiations were “friendly and cooperative.”
“It was a healthy negotiation,” said Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old stereo equipment mogul who bought the ailing weekly from The Washington Post Co. in September and subsequently announced plans to merge with IAC-owned Daily Beast in November and install Tina Brown as the editor of the combined operation.
“There are still one or two minor things” to settle before the merger of Newsweek with the Beast — to form a new joint-venture company to be called Newsweek Daily Beast — is finalized, said Harman.
Under terms of the contract, staffers are expected to get 3 percent pay hikes next January. They also get a new 401(k) plan. Some of the lower-paid Beast employees may see immediate pay hikes, if their salary is below the minimum scale established by the contract for their position, said O’Meara, who added that no staffers will get pay cuts if they are above the minimum.
Just in time
Marty Peretz, the controversial editor-in-chief of The New Republic, admits he hasn’t done much real editing at the magazine in years — and now that he has turned 70 and has moved to Israel, he is finally getting around to taking his name off the masthead as editor-in-chief.
Richard Just, who has been doing most of the real editing, will now get the editor-in-chief title.
“I have been with The New Republic going on 37 years, almost all of them with the title of editor-in-chief,” Peretz wrote in a farewell note. “The truth is that I hardly ever actually edited an article for the magazine. But, frankly, it was my vision and the vision of my compatriots of what was needed for a serious journal of opinion in American society that defined what TNR has become since 1974.”
He said he will serve as editor-in-chief emeritus and will continue to write a column on the Web site.
Peretz, a former Harvard professor who counted former Vice President Al Gore as a prized student, steered the weekly on a left-leaning, pro-Israel course. His caustic remarks sometimes stirred unusual controversies, like the one that followed comments he made last fall regarding the flap over plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero.
“Frankly, Muslim life is cheap,” he wrote, “most notably to Muslims.” He said he wondered “whether I need to honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment,” adding “which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”
New editor Just didn’t return a call, but Peretz, in the farewell, said that Just “has my full confidence.”