Publishers’ sandstorm gathers in Hamptons
S UMMER
must be just around the corner. A preseason brawl is breaking out on the Hamptons publishing scene as Michael Dickey, chief executive of Modern Luxury, takes aim at
Cristina Cuomo and her new startup magazine, Hamptons Purist.
Cuomo, as reported exclusively by Media Ink, is launching a magazine and Web site to go after the burgeoning wellness and healthy living market on the monied East End — a place where people still appear to read.
Now, Dickey says he is repositioning his Beach title to go after the same niche. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise. The ill will between the two stretches back to November, when Dickey sacked Cuomo from her job as editor of Beach — which she started for his company more than four years ago while also editing Modern Luxury’s Manhattan.
“They are copying my idea,” Cuomo laments of Beach’s sudden shift. “It just seems mean.”
“Maybe she’s copying us,” Dickey counters. “We’ve been working on this idea for over a year.“
That seems a little far-fetched, since Dickey’s company only had one title in the market until recently. The acquisition by Atlanta-based Modern Luxury of rival GreenGale Publishing last month gave Dickey a seeming overlap, control of two magazines on the East End: Beach and Hamptons — the 39-year-old daddy of East End mags.
Dickey had also booted Cuomo’s sister, Andrea Greeven Douzet, as publisher of Beach and Manhattan when he pink-slipped Cuomo and most of the edit staff last fall.
Interestingly, it was Greeven Douzet who first introduced Dickey and GreenGale’s then-CEO Kather
ine Nicholls in early 2014, shortly after Greeven Douzet had started at Modern Luxury. She had earlier worked at GreenGale.
Meanwhile, ad representatives for Beach recently pitched advertisers, telling them that placements in edi- torial could be arranged.
“With Debra [ Halpert] as group publisher and Phebe Callaway
Wahl as our editor, Beach will remain ... a leader in the marketplace and is open to integrating our advertisers into editorial!” said the e-mail.
Interestingly, the e-mail pitch for ads contained no reference to a repositioning of Beach. It said only that Beach “will be full of whimsical and fun editorial.”
Dickey insisted that the line from his ad rep was misinterpreted. “This ad sales representative was referring to Modern Luxury’s special advertorial sections that are sponsored by our valued brand clients and are always clearly marked as advertisements. Modern Luxury runs advertorials in all of our publications nationally. As a matter of policy, Modern Luxury does not tie editorial decisions to advertising.”
Still, he is hoping to outgun Cuomo with a larger staff. “We have an armada of people in the Hamptons,” boasted Dickey.
Cuomo, the wife of CNN news anchor Chris Cuomo and sister-inlaw to Gov. Cuomo, is banking on deep connections out East to help jump-start her fledgling publication, whose first issue comes out over the Memorial Day weekend. She said her replacement as editor of Hamptons and Beach is from out of town and an unknown out East. “You don’t want to be a poseur in that space,” she said. “You want to be authentic.”
Mark my Twitter
Twitter’s stock was soaring for the second day in a row Tuesday, jumping 4 percent, to close at $18.24 a share — now that billionaire investor Mark Cuban says he has snapped up shares.
That follows a nearly 7 percent on Monday after former Mayor Mike
Bloomberg and Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey revealed a new joint 24/7 video news channel to be unveiled in the fall.
Speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” Tuesday, Cuban said, “My biggest holdings are Amazon, which I think is the leader in the space, and Netflix for video, and I started buying Twitter recently because I think they finally got their act together on artificial intelligence.”
After the market closed Monday, Twitter unveiled more plans, including teaming up with Derek Jeter’s Players’ Tribune on sports news.
‘Doc’ in the house
Condé Nast said it’s going to debut a documentary video series, “Through the Fire” — taking a look at the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished (plus one who survived) in an Arizona wildfire four years ago — as part of an offering of 100 digital videos slated for the 2017-18 season. Sony will separately release a film, produced by Condé Nast Entertainment , on the topic in October. The lineup includes 40 new series and 65 renewals, including Vogue’s “73 Questions,” videos in which celebrities answer questions on lifestyle, but are allowed only one take. At the NewFronts presentation, Dawn Ostroff, Condé Nast Entertainment president, said the company is pushing premium digital video to millennials. “As mobile becomes the new prime time among younger audiences, our digital network now outperforms some traditional television networks,” she said, adding it often outpulls digital networks such as Vice.