Meredith set to auction off Time & SI July 2
THE auction for the four magazines that were the beating heart of the old Time Inc. empire — Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money — is moving toward final bids by the suitors to Meredith Corp. by July 2.
That means the sell-off is taking a tad longer than Meredith hoped, but the company is still expecting a hefty return despite the titles recent ad slumps. The cachet of the brand names is helping to fuel the auction anticipation.
There are now two to three finalists — down from the 45 to 50 who submitted initial bids — eyeing each title, said a source close to the situation.
Among those who looked early on and are still believed to be in the hunt: Jimmy Finkelstein, the owner of The Hill and a former part owner of everything from The Hollywood Reporter to legal trade pubs; Jay Penske, whose Penske Media owns Rolling Stone, Variety and WWD and who landed a $200 million investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund; and Studio VC, a Liam Lynch- helmed venture firm that owns Broadway.com and purchased the Irish-Central Web site for $3 million in 2016.
There is also said to be a mystery vanity-buyer looking at Fortune and Money.
Edgar Bronfman Jr. was approached to join one of the bidding teams but balked at taking smaller slices of the pie this time.
He, of course, had teamed with two other billionaires, Len Blavatnik and Ynon Kreiz in 2016 to try to buy the whole Time Inc. for $18 a share but eventually dropped out of the hunt won by Meredith, which paid $2.8 billion, or $18.50 a share, for Time Inc., including $1.85 billion in cash and close to $1 billion in assumed debt.
Meredith early on had rejected a pre-emptive offer from National Enquirer owner American Media Inc. for about $375 million for all four titles.
More recently, the company is said to be expecting to fetch more than $200 million each for the magazines.
Latina lower
Latina Media’s woes keep growing. It has apparently lost its last remaining co-president, Asten Morgan, and is facing a lawsuit from its top sales rep over unpaid wages, while its Web site has been dark for over two months.
Surprisingly, Solera Capital, the venture firm that owns Latina, has begun issuing checks to unpaid freelancers in recent weeks after facing pressure from the National Writers Union.
“We’ve collected about $43,800 for 13 freelancers,” said NWU President Larry Goldbetter. “There are more who have contacted us, and we will seek to get them paid as well.”
Solera Capital is a politically connected women-owned venture fund which counts Diana Taylor, the longtime gal pal of Michael Bloomberg, as vice chairman.
Calls and e-mails to Taylor and Solera CEO Molly Ashby were not returned by press time.
Morgan is the second co-presi- dent to walk away from the financially strapped media company.
“He’s been the point person for a lot of the angry calls, but he’s also owed a ton of money,” said one source close to Morgan.
Robyn Moreno, the other copresident, resigned in April, according to a Twitter post of hers.
Michelle Cortes, the former top sales rep who was making a noncommission base salary of nearly $100,000 a year, said in a federal lawsuit — filed in US Southern District Court in Manhattan against Latina and Solera — that she did not get paid from March 1 until she left on April 11. She had worked there since 2011.
The company’s Web site remains dead, saying only: “We’ll Be Back Soon!”
Sprawl away
Check local listings. Advertising Week New York, which used to sprawl over half a dozen or more venues in Manhattan, will be consolidated under one roof at the 13-screen AMC Loews Lincoln Square theater for the four- day event that starts Oct. 1. “Over the years, we’ve staged Advertising Week all over town, from Tribeca to Time Warner Center and into Times Square, where we stitched together a collection of theaters and other venues,” said Matt Scheckner, CEO of Stillwell Partners, the exhibition company behind the Advertising Week event. Other cities hosting Adverting Week like London, Tokyo, Mexico City and Sydney all ggather under one roof. “It elevates the whole experience,” he said, but since the NYC show attracts close to 100,000 people over four days, it is no easy find. “For our 15th anniversary year, we were hell-bent to find that true home for Advertising Week — a physical space where we could unite the whole industry and come together — and we found it.” Among the speakers who have committed this year are some big guns, including Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, Mastercard Chief Marketing Officer Raja Rajamannar and Cole Haan CMO David Maddocks.