Over and out: ‘Studio 360’ radio show ending
MEDIA icon Kurt Andersen, a co-founder of Spy magazine and a best-selling author, is giving up his syndicated public radio show “Studio 360” after 20 years.
Andersen tells Media Ink he is “winding it down now” in part because of growing competition from blogs and podcasts that are now doing much of the same thing.
“When we started, there was no other show like it,” said Andersen of his show, which vows it will “get inside the creative mind.”
“Now everyone is covering it,” he said of the show, which recently talked to AmySherald, whopainted the official Michelle Obama portrait, “about her strict religious upbringing ... and why she’ll only ever paint African-Americans.”
Andersen will be banking new shows between now and year end, but the weekly show that has a syndicated audience of 500,000 and another 100,000 on podcasts won’t go dark until Feb. 27.
He’s going to put more energy into finishing his next nonfiction book, which faces a January deadline to be published next fall by RandomHouse — in advance of the 2020 election.
“Next month will be my 20th year doing the show,” said Andersen, who started his journalism career at Time with Graydon Carter, who went on to become synonymous with Vanity Fair when he was editor.
Andersen and Carter, of course, were co-founding editors of Spy.
His next nonfiction book, still untitled “will be kind of a sequel to ‘Fantasyland,’” his nonfiction tome on the founding of America going back to the Pilgrims.
He said the new book will pick up the arc of public life in the 1970s leading to the election of Ronald Reagan and following through to the current era of President Trump, who was a frequent target of Spy in its heyday.
Andersen’s last book, co-authored with Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin, was titled: “You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really
Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (ASo-Called Parody).”
Tech giants scolded
Roger Lynch, the low-profile CEO of Condé Nast, has became the second major publishing executive in a week to call for the government to rein in Facebook and Google.
In a talk with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin Wednesday, Lynch indicated he is unhappy about all the digital ad dollars flowing to the two titans of tech — while publishers create much of the content that attracts the ads.
“I think there are real issues that need to be looked at, given the dominance of these companies and the impact, and maybe unintended impact, it has on other industries,” he said.
“From a publishing standpoint or content standpoint, when you have two companies that are taking 90 percent of the growth in digital advertising and other companies are doing 100 percent of the content creation and production, there’s a little bit that’s out of balance there.”
Time magazine co-owner Marc Benioff said last week he thought the two tech giants should be busted for antitrust reasons.
Google will draw $48.69 billion in US digital ad revenue in 2019, or 37.7 percent of the market, while Facebook will capture $29.92 billion for 23.2 percent of the market, according to research firm eMarketer. Amazon will snag 7.6 percent, for $9.85 billion.
On Thursday, Condé Nast unveiled a new management shake-up designed to capture a little more of the ad dollars. The shake-up will see the exit of respected veteran Chris Mitchell, chief business officer of the culture group and a one-time publisher of Wired, GQ and Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair, which was once in his group, gets shifted over to Susan Plagemann’s style group, which will now include the beauty and fashion categories, responsible for revenue in Allure, Glamour, GQ and Vogue.
Gannett holdup
The European Union says it has seen no antitrust problems with New Media Investment Co.’s Gatehouse Media in its $1.4 billion acquisition of USA Today publisher Gannett. The EU became involved because Gannett has some European operations. The deal had already cleared antitrust regulators in the US. But the Federal Communications Commission still has some questions for Apollo Global Management, the company that is bankrolling New Media Investment’s takeover bid. The FCC usually does not scrutinize newspaper deals. But as The Post exclusively reported last week, Apollo is in the final stages of buying a majority stake in Cox Enterprises’ 13 TV stations in a $3 billion deal. And that means Gatehouse-Gannett comes under scrutiny as well — as first revealed by Nypost.com on Oct. 11. Gatehouse and Gannett appear not overly worried, however, as they are still scheduling a shareholder vote to approve the megadeal on Nov. 14. “Both transactions are still under review,” a spokesman for the FCC told Media Ink.