Wenner’s main money guy moves to Apple U.
APPLE University, the secretive inhouse training program of the tech titan, has raided Wenner Media and hired away its chief revenue officer.
David Kang, a Harvard Business School grad, was Wenner’s chief digital officer before being elevated to the CRO job this past June.
Kang is headed to Cupertino, Calif., by Sept. 30, sources said, where he will be a teacher.
A spokeswoman for Wenner, home of Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal and Us Weekly, confirmed only that Kang had “resigned” — although he was still in the office as of Thursday.
Kang did not return a call seeking comment.
Apple University was started by Steve Jobs in 2008 and is run by the former head of the Yale School of Management, Joel Podolny.
We asked Apple for confirmation that Kang was headed to Apple — and to confirm his job title — but had not gotten a response by press time.
Apple is said to frown on its employees discussing the University, which is a yearround classroom training center.
On the Wenner front, it suggests the Jann Wenner’s succession plan may have hit a speed bump.
Kang had developed mobile web apps for the company’s three magazines and negotiated a content deal with Yahoo!
He was seen as a vital ally of Gus Wenner, the 23year old son of the company founder.
The younger Wenner is being piped as the nearterm successor to take over the company from his 68year old dad.
No replacement has been named for Kang.
More Blouin heat
There is more trouble for The Red Queen.
The mini artpublishing empire of Louise Blouin took its biggest hit to date as printing giant R.R. Donnelley slapped the publisher of Modern Painters and Art + Auction with a new lawsuit. The suit seeks a judgment after Blouin stopped making payments on a $1 million printing tab, it is alleged.
Donnelley had already dragged Blouin to court earlier this year, claiming at that time she owed them $754,588.96.
She was able to get a $15,000 “credit” on the bill and agreed in a March 19 settlement to begin making $20,000 a month installment payments.
While she was making payments on the past due amount, the printer very generously started printing her magazines again and allowed her to run up a new bill of $290,370.54
But then in July the payments stopped. The latest suit, filed by Donnelley lawyer Samuel Grafton on Sept. 16 says the unpaid tab has swollen to $1,008,024.07.
Blouin, dubbed The Red Queen by former employees, at one time was pegged as among the 200 richest women in Britain thanks to the sale of a auto classified shopper empire that was founded by herself and her now exhusband.
The Red Queen was derived from her fashion attire as well as for her “off with their heads” management style.
In the Donnelley case, she had personally guaranteed the payments in her midMarch settlement and is named as a defendant in the suit along with Louise Blouin Media and LTB Media.
Blouin recently put her posh duplex in a Richard Meirdesigned building on Charles St. on the block for $34 million, according to the Real Deal.
Blouin also owns a beachfront home with a fancy guest house on Gin Lane in Southampton. Neither of those addresses are listed as her residence in the Donnelley suit, which puts her home at 88 Laight St. in Manhattan, not far from the new offices the firm moved into earlier this year.
Media Ink attempted to reach Blouin by text, email and phone without success.
RD cuts back
Reader’s Digest Association, after first returning to 12 times a year frequency for its flagship magazine two years ago, is dropping back to 10 for 2015.
The change, detailed in the October issue, is being made in part because the company found, like many others in publishing, that the digital editions that some were looking to as an inexpensive alternative to sending print editions did not quite live up to its early hype.
The magazine had 132,294 digital editions sold in the first half of 2014, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, considered a very solid number.
Liz Vaccariello, the editorinchief for the past three years, said, “We were one of the first publishers to go after digital subscriptions with the iPad and the Kindle, but they plateaued.”
So after two years with 12 print and digital issues, it will return to a 10times frequency next year, starting with the December/January issue.
The July/August will also be a double issue.
The switch “makes the bbusiness more solid,” Vaccariello said. In the first half of 2014, the magazine was one of the few consumer mags with a big boost in single copy sales, jumping 16.1 percent to 181,967 copies, according to AAM.
Still, the overall circulation was down 38.1 percent to 3,418,579.