Guccione to give webzine a new ‘Spin’
THE new owners of Spin have turned to the music webzine’s rock ’n’ roll founder, Bob Guccione Jr., to help it recapture some of its past glory, The Post has learned.
Santa Monica, Calif.-based private equity firm Next Management Partners, which bought Spin in January from the company that owns Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, has named Guccione — son of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione — as a “creative adviser,” sources said.
“He’s the one who put the magic into Spin,” said Jimmy Hutcheson, chief executive of Next Management Partners, which specializes in digital media. “He’s very much in the saddle with us. He pushes the creative team to be better and help everyone grow.”
Guccione — famous for his longrunning feud with Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose — says he’ll be involved right from the start on a redesign of the Web site. There are no plans to revive the print version, which folded in 2012.
“Several previous owners let it atrophy,” Guccione said of the mag that made waves in 1991 for publishing the embarrassing terms of interview demands by Rose’s band. “The young audience today gets bored very easily — you can’t have a day when you’re not producing something relevant.”
Guccione also wants to ensure the digital publication is about more than just music. “Music is the common denominator, but it’s social issues, lifestyle and pop culture. It’s for young people on the threshold of adulthood and you have to take a holistic approach.”
“I think the heritage of the brand is still there and it still has quite a bit of cachet in the music industry,” added Hutcheson, whose company paid an undisclosed sum to pick up the title from Valence Media.
Spin quickly gained a reputation as an irreverent voice when it kicked off in the late 1980s, including a free condom advertised on a 1988 cover to draw attention to an article on the AIDS epidemic. It gained credibility as it began covering the grunge music scene in the ’90s, including a famous cover of Kurt Cobain, his wife Courtney Love and their newborn in 1992.
Guccione sold the title in 1997 for $43.5 million at a staggering 29 times earnings, which allowed him to walk away with close to $20 million while his partners David Horowitz , an MTV co-founder and Stephen Swid, a record industry executive, split the rest.
Guccione started the magazine with a loan from his father in 1985. But when the parent company, General Media, ran into financial difficulties, the elder Guccione pulled the plug, leading to a years-long riff between the famous father and his eldest son. The younger “Gooch” quickly found other backers and the two didn’t speak for two decades.
“My father and I couldn’t agree how to go forward, so we split,” said Guccione. They finally reconciled several years before the elder Guccione lost his battle with cancer in 2010.
A year after selling Spin, Guccione started Gear in 1998, but it folded in 2002, a victim of that era’s post 9/11 ad recession. He went on to be a minority partner and editor-in-chief of Discover magazine until it sold in 2007. In 2017, he started an adventure travel Web site Wonderlust, which he said is breaking even.
But he never lost his affinity for
Spin.
Trib trouble
A controversial $9 million quarterly dividend that Tribune Publishing was planning to award to shareholders has been scrapped, as the company that publishes the Chicago Tribune and the New
York Daily News also moved for an extension to file a quarterly earnings statement scheduled for May 8.
The company also said it’s bidding adieu to Julie Xanders, executive vice president and chief legal counsel, at the end of the month.
The dividend had become a hotbutton issue for the Chicago News Guild as the company was negotiating with the union for additional cuts to the editorial staff at the Chicago Tribune. In negotiations over the past two weeks, the company had declined to discuss the dividend, the union said.
But in an SEC filing on May 8, Tribune disclosed the “board of directors has suspended the company’s quarterly cash dividend program until further notice given the unprecedented economic disruption caused by COVID-19.”
“Even after the COVID-19 outbreak has subsided, we may continue to experience significant impacts to our business as a result of the global economic impact, including any economic downturn or recession that has occurred or may occur in the future,” the filing said. The company also said that despite “salary reductions, elimination of staff positions, employee furloughs, revisions to manufacturing and distribution processes” and other moves, “these measures may not be sufficient to prevent adverse impacts on our business and financial position from COVID-19.