How to Lose $100 Million
The undoing of Tina Brown
By LUKE O’BRIEN, Politico.com
May/June 2014
From the living room of Barry Diller’s Manhattan apartment in the Carlyle Hotel, it is possible, on a clear day, to see the Midtown skyline, where the Condé Nast building rises like a ziggurat from the Gilded Age of magazine journalism. The view was an appropriate one for a man who in the autumn of 2010 was about to pour millions of dollars into the dead tree business.
Diller runs IAC, a portfolio of Internet companies that includes Match.com, OkCupid and Vimeo. His tolerance for risk is such that his friend David Geffen once described the fireplug of a billionaire as having “elephant balls.” Diller’s bets often pay off. He owns one of the biggest sailing yachts in the world. His neighbor is Mick Jagger. Print journalism, though, would be a different kind of gamble for him.
Joining Diller in his living room was 92-year-old stereo magnate Sidney Harman. A few weeks earlier, Harman had paid $1 to buy Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. The once-proud magazine was in a death spiral, having lost more than $70 million in the previous two years, after various failed efforts to save it had only resulted in circulation plunging to half of what it had been a few years earlier, an exodus of marquee writers and a full-fledged identity crisis. Harman—who had taken on what a well-placed source told me was nearly $75 million in liabilities for his $1—needed a turnaround artist.
(More here.)
By LUKE O’BRIEN, Politico.com
May/June 2014
From the living room of Barry Diller’s Manhattan apartment in the Carlyle Hotel, it is possible, on a clear day, to see the Midtown skyline, where the Condé Nast building rises like a ziggurat from the Gilded Age of magazine journalism. The view was an appropriate one for a man who in the autumn of 2010 was about to pour millions of dollars into the dead tree business.
Diller runs IAC, a portfolio of Internet companies that includes Match.com, OkCupid and Vimeo. His tolerance for risk is such that his friend David Geffen once described the fireplug of a billionaire as having “elephant balls.” Diller’s bets often pay off. He owns one of the biggest sailing yachts in the world. His neighbor is Mick Jagger. Print journalism, though, would be a different kind of gamble for him.
Joining Diller in his living room was 92-year-old stereo magnate Sidney Harman. A few weeks earlier, Harman had paid $1 to buy Newsweek from the Washington Post Co. The once-proud magazine was in a death spiral, having lost more than $70 million in the previous two years, after various failed efforts to save it had only resulted in circulation plunging to half of what it had been a few years earlier, an exodus of marquee writers and a full-fledged identity crisis. Harman—who had taken on what a well-placed source told me was nearly $75 million in liabilities for his $1—needed a turnaround artist.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home