Hugh Hefner is taking Playboy Enterprises private again after a deal valuing the company at $207 million.

According to Business Week, Hefner increased his per-share bid by 65 cents over the amount he offered back in July:

Hefner, 84, is offering to buy the Class A stock and Class B shares he doesn’t already own for $6.15 per share, representing an 18 percent premium over the Class B closing price of $5.20 a share on Jan. 7, the company said in a statement today. Hefner said in July he would pay $5.50 a share in cash for the stock.

FriendFinder Networks, the company that owns Penthouse, also made an attempt in July to purchase the company for $210 million. It was determined by Playboy’s board that giving control of the company to Hefner was in Playboy Enterprises’ best interests. In a statement, Hefner opined that the transition to being a privately held company was the right direction for the company:

“With the completion of this transaction, Playboy will come full circle, returning to its roots as a private company. The brand resonates today as clearly as at any time in its 57-year history.”

In the past decade, Playboy has seen massive drops in circulation due to steep competition from web-based adult entertainment outfits.

Hefner leads buyout to take Playboy private is a post from: The Inquisitr

Like many girls in my age group scattered across America, Sassy magazine was a massive influence on my pre-teenage years.

My 25-year-old friends are too young to really remember Sassy. My 40-year-old friends were old enough that they didn’t need Sassy. But for me, Sassy was a lifeline featuing girls who dressed like me, listened to the music I liked, skewering teen-queen of the time Tiffani Amber-Theissen during an interview- it was kind of like the “It Gets Better” campaign for awkward young teenage girls in the late 80s and early 90s.

One day, Sassy stopped coming. No one knew what happened. There was no internet on which fangirls could discuss the sudden, catastrophic absence of Sassy from our mailboxes. No more tutorials on how a large onesie could make an awesome small t-shirt. No amazing short stories introducing us to better young adult lit. No more inspired fashion spreads and Kurt/Courtney interviews and music reviews and staff we knew by their first names. We know the sad tale now, but at the time, it was like losing a beloved friend suddenly and without explanation.

Then it returned. But it was like one of those movies where the protagonist is fighting an insidious invasion and she goes to school one day and her super-cool best friend is one of them. Some horrible magazine overlords took our bible and turned it into YM. It was the worst kind of betrayal, and the new, soulless Sassy thankfully folded after a few painful issues.

The legacy of Sassy lived on in the minds of girls of a certain age, though- among my friends, we still refer to people uncomfortably fixated on an unwilling love interest as “reznored”- and there was even a book, in later years. When I saw someone had written How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, it was exciting to see that other women felt the same way about Sassy.

So it is with some measure of trepidation I absorbed the tidbit that Sassy is being brought back in a form that may finally work. Jane gave Sassy readers hope, but it didn’t scratch the same itch its predecessor did. Lucky recalled a bit of Sassy nostalgia with its awesome curation of items, but it isn’t nor does it try to be Sassy. Teen fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson, who is well-known in fashion circles and amazingly wise beyond her 14 years, posted on her own blog yesterday that she’s been talking to Jane Pratt and they’re starting a Sassy-esque project.

If anyone can pull off a modern version of this magazine, it’s this kid. Reading her post (linked in the announcement post) after she received a stack of old Sassys in the mail literally brought tears to my eyes, and I don’t think one ex-Sassy reader has read Tavi’s blog and not been reminded of the late, great, best teen magazine ever. Gevinson says she doesn’t expect to replicate the magazine exactly, and with her characteristic old-soulness, states an intention that gives me hope for a similar resource for my daughter:

Of course, it won’t be Sassy (or the rebirth of Sassy, or Sassy 2.0) and nor do we want it to be. For one, you can’t try to recreate something that good. For another, while I can read old issues of Sassy and relate, the world has changed a bit in the past 15 or so years, and that whole Internet thing happened, and this world calls for something different. Something that will use Sassy as a point of reference for the whole teen-magazine-that-doesn’t-suck thing, and something in which Jane Pratt will take part, but something that is not trying to recreate the other something a bunch of us love and don’t want to see copied.

They say you can never go home again, but reading Tavi’s posts on Sassy definitely let me feel like I could visit. It’s a big undertaking, but Gevinson seems like the obvious choice to take the torch if it has to go to anyone. This could really be totally awesome.

Were you a Sassy reader? Are you excited about this new development?

Jane Pratt taps blogger Tavi Gevinson to revive ‘Sassy’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

So, the iPad is here. No more speculation. The gushing – and the bashing – has commenced as was totally expected. The news organizations are claiming that their salvation has arrived courtesy of Steve Jobs having a vision. It has already been broken, blended and other wise abused as everyone and their brother is flooding the blogosphere and mainstream press with stories about the revolutionary and magical device.

Is it really though or is it really nothing more than a further siloing of the Web?

I have been reading a lot of the news coming out about the iPad, both the gushingly positive and the pageview grabbing negative but all the things things that everyone is lauding as groundbreaking and game changing strike me as the beginnings of a type of segregation of the Web. It is a segregation that has the free and open Web on one side and the controlled silos of access and increasing cost on the other.

The singular view

One of the more hotly debated points of the iPhone and now the iPad is the lack of multi-tasking (the ability to view or do more than one thing at a time). The defenders of this discrepancy say that it really isn’t needed and besides if it is then Apple will add it in at some future point, which is really a nice way to say we’re so in love with our shiny bauble that we’ll suffer through not having it.

But the lack of a multi-tasking ability in this day and age is curious because it returns us to a time in computers when everything was full screen and single program at a time. Doing anything else meant trying to use all kinds of hacks – DesqVIEW or NovellDOS anyone?

So the idea that returning to some sort of singular view when using even a web-enabled <computing> platform doesn’t strike me as any real leap forward. If anything it is more about locking in one’s attention to one thing at a time and reducing options. This is neither magical nor revolutionary.

Same old media greed, just a new platform

If there is one industry that is trumpeting their salvation all because of the iPad it would have to be the print media. Regardless of whether or not their vapid drooling over is reminiscent of the similar proclamations made when the CD-ROM came on the scene I find it rather humorous that this so-called resurrection of their dying business model was available to all on Easter Weekend.

Hopefully that will be enough to instill some humor in people because the obvious cash grab being made by newspapers and magazines is nothing short of obscene. Indicative of this highway robbery attitude is TIME magazine where not only do you have to pay $4.99 each week but you have to download a whole new app to be able to read their content.

How is that greedy you ask?

Well answer this simple question: how much does it cost any one of these newspapers or magazines to create one copy of an issue?

As I pointed out in another post when talking about e-books there is an inherent cost when publishing a physical newspaper or magazine. Beyond the costs that can also be associated with a digital version, such as digital typesetting, you have the incurred costs of the paper, wages to people manning the presses, wages for delivery people and any number of other costs.

Those all disappear when you are selling a digital version. Sure your costs for design and typesetting might be slightly higher given the supposed interactivity the new medium brings with it but in the end you are only paying for the creation of one item that can be forever copied. So how many of those digital copies do you need to sell before you actually start making a profit – a 1,000 … 5,000 … 10,000?

Then you have those media companies that figure that since the rubes were silly enough to buy the iPad in the first place chances are they won’t be smart enough to see that we’re charging more for the digital version than for the hold in your hand newsprint version. Much like the Wall Street journal is with wanting to charge you $17.99 a month when in fact you can subscribe to the WSJ site for $1.99 a week.

If this isn’t being greedy then I don’t know what is but perhaps the words of some-one like Paul Kedrosky, venture capitalist and private equity investor, will carry a little more weight than mine. As he said on Twitter about WSJ’s move

Paying $17.29/mo for WSJ iPad app should disqualify you for something important, like being allowed to use money.

Yup we’re seeing a lot of revolutionary change there.

It might be a silo but damn it’s a pretty one.

The thing about the non-iPad Web is that you can easily go wherever you want, read whatever you want and for the most part it won’t cost you a cent beyond what your broadband provider is reaming your for. When it comes to the iPad Web though things have changed and the old media companies are betting the farm on the fact that we won’t care that we now have to increasingly pay for what we want to read or watch as well as creating an ecosphere where you are like a the very captive audience we decried as we fled to the web in the first place.

This iPad Web is nothing about changing the world or making it easier for grandma to surf the web and everything to do with locking us in one more to a monetized experience. As Kevin Anderson said on Strange Attractor

Looking at the iPad app rollout, you can easily separate the digital wheat from the chaff in the content industries, and you can see those who are developing digital businesses and those who are trying to protect print margins and who see the iPad as a vertical, closed model to control and monetise content.

There are those who believe that they sell content and that they should be compensated for it. Just as with the music industry, they couch this in terms of repaying content creators, when it really is more about wistfulness for the days of double-digit profit margins.

Those who view their primary business as selling content believe that not only can they charge for it but that they can actually charge the same or more for it, just because it is on the iPad.

However it is not only the old media companies that are salivating at the mouth over the hope that the iPad Web is the next hot territory. I would imagine that companies like Facebook and Twitter are just as busy frothing at the mouth at the potential of having a platform where they can get our undivided attention and occupy even more of our dwindling free time. After all just think of all the advertising they will be able to serve up to such a captive audience.

Gee .. sounds like some sort of next generation television eh.

Will any of this common sense change anything?

Not likely.

Look, the iPad is going to be a success no matter how you slice or dice it. Jobs will have another feather in his cap and Apple will make billions of more dollars.

People will love it and people will hate it but the reality is that Apple isn’t targeting the geek – or even semi-geek crowd with this. Just as with the iPod Apple is going for the general consumer jugular and on that basis alone the iPad will be the answer for a lot of people.

Regardless of the hype and all the frothing the iPad isn’t transformative neither is it game changing or magical. It is however the next ATM machine for old media and trust me they are going to pump it for all it is worth and that in itself could be the biggest stumbling block to a wider success and adoption.

Is the iPad the beginning of a second class Web? is a post from: The Inquisitr

After writing about how newspapers seem hellbent to act like a bunch of lemmings headed over a cliff under the rallying cry of Rupert Murdoch it is almost a pleasure to write about a bunch of magazine competitors who seem to have finally caught on to how they might be able to succeed as their world changes around them.

As much as the newspaper industry might be facing some hard times the road forward has to be doubly hard for those publishing magazines. Where newspapers can at least fall back on the old mantra of printing the news as it happens magazine have always be thought of as the more of a monthly collection of long prose and glossy pictures. All of which is really hard to market in the Internet age – especially one crawling headlong into the real-time web.

Where they have funnily enough stood a chance of surviving in my opinion is in the growing mobile space where if done right their presentation is suited to the small viewing area fond on smartphones. The two big problems though are that people are increasingly use to a one-stop shopping experience ala iTunes and the App Store and aren’t inclined to go running about the web and paying piecemeal for content. The other problem is much more basic – people want everything for free especially when it comes to news.

With that in mind Time Inc., Conde Nast and Hearst have agreed to come together under the banner of a new company that will provide a unified web store where readers will be able to buy any one of the 50 magazines that the various partners publish.

Each magazine publisher now believes it’s too risky to go it alone to find new ways to get consumers to pay. If they all join together, the reasoning goes, they stand a better chance of producing greater revenue.

The deal is taking time to complete because it involves so many moving pieces.

“It’s pretty complicated stuff,” said a source. “The really, really hard part is that you’ve got so many different kinds of devices running on different operating systems. And how do you handle that? The consortium provides one point of contact for the consumer. When you come to the main store, you can get the content any way you want.”

Source: The Observer

Now as Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb noted

Most importantly, these companies will also have to reinvent their magazines for the digital age along the lines of Wired’s app for the rumored Apple Tablet or Condé Nast’s iPhone version of GQ (iTunes link). One of the reasons these publications are suffering is the long lead time that makes most of the content outdated by the time it arrives at the printer. While this still works for magazines like the Atlantic, which mostly publishes in-depth long form articles that aren’t time-sensitive, gossip magazines can’t really compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton. Just putting a digital copy of their magazines online simply won’t cut it.

He’s absolutely right – just unifying what they are already doing on the web under one umbrella and expecting people to be willing to pay for it based on that alone will only guarantee that the project will fail.

If they do manage to come up with unique content available via the store alone in order to add some extra value people are willing to pay for then yes I think this is a viable idea that could work out very well.

Too bad Murdoch doesn’t try forward thinking ideas like this instead of beating his chest against the big bully called Google.

Magazine rivals to join forces for iTunes-like magazine stand is a post from: The Inquisitr

Publishing giant Condé Nast announced today that it was discontinuing Gourmet magazine, an influential publication that has been published since 1940.

The closure comes as a shock, as Gourmet is a more influential magazine than fellow Condé Nast title Bon Appétit, and Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl is well known and powerful in food and restaurant circles. Condé Nast is also closing Cookie, Elegant Bride and Modern Bride, and in the past year has closed newer titles Condé Nast Portfolio, Domino and Men’s Vogue.

The New York Times reports that the closure of the 69-year-old title came as a shock even to industry insiders such as Bon Appétit publisher Paul Jowdy. The Times spoke with Jowdy in February (conceding that Jowdy was interviewed in far safer economic times) and he then doubted the title would be retired:

“They would never do that,” Mr. Jowdy said in February. “They’re both very important magazines in the culinary world, and they’re very different magazines, and they’re both very healthy. So there’s all these rumors that are just ridiculous. I try not to pay attention to them, but you have to know — if you think of two of the most prestigious, credible, trusted magazines in the industry, you’re going to say Bon Appétit and Gourmet.”

Condé Nast shutters Gourmet, Cookie, 2 bridal titles is a post from: The Inquisitr

Iconic snail mail spam company Reader’s Digest has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but sadly they’re likely to survive.

The Reader’s Digest bankruptcy filing was pre-arranged with debtors, and will allow the company to restructure its debt, bringing it down from a whopping $2.2 billion to an apparently more manageable $500 million.

Sadly for those of us outside the United States, the bankruptcy only applies to the US entity, not the subsidiaries in countries such as Canada and Australia.

Although apparently much loved for its magazine, Reader’s Digest is perhaps better known for its direct marketing campaigns that include sweepstakes draws and dummy checks saying people have won. Magazine publishing is difficult across the board in the current economic climate, but spamming physical letterboxes in an age where consumer awareness is high must be a harder business again.

Maybe there is a god: Reader’s Digest files for bankruptcy is a post from: The Inquisitr

Hearst Corp. is preparing to launch its own electronic reader, CNN Money reports, with the hope of bringing the magazine market into the palms of people’s hands. CNN cites “industry insiders” as saying Hearst’s reader will be more catered toward newspapers and magazines than books, boasting a “large-format screen” that will meet periodicals’ “reading and advertising requirements.”

As for any official comment, a Hearst exec said only that the company was “keenly interested” in the idea and expected the devices to be a “big part of [its] future.”

Interestingly, Hearst is also said to have invested in E Ink–the Boston-area company that creates the technology behind Amazon’s Kindle product as well as the Sony Reader. The same company produced a moving image on the cover of Esquire–also owned by Hearst–last year.

Kindle Getting Competition From Cosmo Publisher is a post from: The Inquisitr

The company has already defaulted on $413 million in outstanding bonds.

According to a SEC filing, the new deadline is midnight, January 26.

According to the NY Post, the company warned in the filing that “given the continued weakness of the credit markets, there can be no assurance that the company can refinance its existing notes or obtain the additional capital necessary to satisfy its short-term cash needs on satisfactory terms.”

If the bondholders demand payment on that debt, “the company may have to liquidate assets on unfavorable terms or be unable to continue as a going concern and incur additional costs associated with bankruptcy.”

The company has been cutting staff across the board, with a recent round said to total 10% of the workforce.

American Media Inc Facing Bankruptcy, Liquidation: Already Defaulted on $413m is a post from: The Inquisitr

The magazine industry has been hit hard by the recession, with advertising by volume dropping 17% in January, according to figures from the Media Industry Newsletter.

Worst hit was Condé Nast, with four magazine titles featuring in the list of top 10 declines for January. Advertising in Wired was down 47% over the same time last year, Architectural Digest 46% and Vogue and Lucky both down 44%.

Other magazines making the top ten include Boating (Hachette Filipacchi Media) Power & Motoryacht (Source Interlink Media), Everyday Food (Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia), Salt Water Sportsman (Bonnier Corporation), Texas Monthly (Emmis Communications), and Boys’ Life (Boy Scouts of America.)

As the New York Times points out, the difference can be seen by all readers: for example Allure magazine went from 70 pages of ads in January 2008 to 41 in January 2009.

The financial situation of Condé Nast going into the downturn is difficult to gauge; the company is an operating unit of Advance Publications Inc, a large newspaper owner, and one of America’s bigger privately held companies, so profit figures aren’t immediately available.

Notably the 17% industry downturn is by volume, not revenue, so the actual hit could be higher again. In a tight market advertising rates will be heading downward as magazines look to fill their inventory, so the financial loss could be 30-40% industry wide.

The only question now is how long for many of these magazines. Even a private company like Advance isn’t going to keep publishing titles that are bleeding money, and unlike the newspaper part of the business, the historical attachment to magazines is much less, making the decision to cease publication easier.

Magazines Hit Hard By Advertising Downturn, Condé Nast The Hardest is a post from: The Inquisitr

Financial weekly The Deal has cut 10%, or 15 employees.

The cuts were across the board out of 150 employees of which 75 were full timers.

New York based the The Deal is a group of finance and business magazines, newspapers and electronic resources covering deal terms of mergers & acquisitions, private equity, venture capital financings, bankruptcies and other topics of interest to the investment banking, private equity and venture capital industries.

The Deal is owned by U.S. Equity Partners and raised its last round of $30 million in 2000. The original The Daily Deal was established in 1989.

(via Folio)

The Deal cuts 10% of workforce is a post from: The Inquisitr

According to reports, 25% of Wired.com’s San Francisco staff have been laid off, with the majority of layoffs coming from tech roles. 10% of the editorial staff have been cut.

According to Valleywag, also gone is Kourosh Karimkhany, the VP of corporate development for CondéNet and a man responsible for the acquisitions of Reddit and Ars Technica.

Peter Kafka at AllThingsD has an official statement from the company:

Visibility for 2009 is very limited and we are adjusting all costs to prepare for slower revenue growth. The adjustments are across the board and include staff restructuring and some reduction. Despite the current environment, CondéNet will end the year slightly up over 2007. These moves will put the company in a stronger position to handle a challenging year ahead and for the business to benefit when the economy and the ad market start to rebound.

The cuts don’t come as any surprise, with Condé Nast announcing a 5% cut across the board (online and offline) November 1.

Update: more from CNet

In an interview with CNET News, Evan Hansen, Wired.com’s editor in chief, said the company downsized to prepare for the economic downturn.

“Revenues are expected to be up year over year but not as much as we expected,” Hansen said. “We’re concerned about 2009 because visibility is murky. We’re taking steps to make sure we’re in good position.”

Hansen declined to discuss who was let go, but sources familiar with the situation said none of the publication’s staff writers was cut. This is only the latest reduction of editorial staffing for Wired.com’s publisher, Conde Nast.

CondéNet cuts: Wired.com lays of 25% of staff is a post from: The Inquisitr

Figures for the 3rd quarter released by the Washington Post showed a massive drop in operating income to $10.1 million, down from $72.2 million, but the majority of the drop was caused by a $60 million charge to write down the value of its Maryland community newspapers and a paper in Washington state.

Advertising delivered good news and bad news. The bad news saw newspaper publishing revenue fall 7% for the quarter off a decline in print advertising revenue of 14% at The Washington Post newspaper. The newspaper division reported an operating loss of $82.7 million in the third quarter of 2008, compared to operating income of $8.8 million in the third quarter of 2007. The good news is that the decline in ad revenue slowed from a 22% decline in the 2nd quarter. Revenue from online properties rose 13%, and non-newspaper related revenue increased 10% for the quarter.

Conde Nast, publisher of a range of well known magazines and online properties has joined the layoff trend announcing a cut in payroll and nonpayroll budgets by 5%. The exact number of jobs to be cut across the company has yet to be determined.

Magazines facing the biggest changes include Men’s Vogue, which will go from 10 issues a year to 2, and Portfolio, which will shift from 12 issues to 10 per year and have its online production outsourced to Wired Digital. Staff cuts at Portfolio are said to be 20%, or 32 members of staff.

Media Briefs: Washington Post mixed results, Conde Nast makes cuts is a post from: The Inquisitr

The figures broken down however paint an interesting divide: in hard times, people are switching to search advertising over display advertising, with search set to hit a 42% share with the majority of that spend heading directly to Google.

Portfolio though notes the side affect of the switch: Heritage Media relies on display advertising, so any switch to search makes it harder for magazines and newspapers to build substitute online revenue to cover their declining heritage media assets.

It’s an interesting notion. I haven’t been able to get a full breakdown on eMarketer’s figures, as the unknown mix is does Adsense fall into the search figure given both are delivered by Adwords, as Heritage Media can run these units. But lets presume that Heritage Media does take a hit on two sides, what does this leave us?

This isn’t a zero sum game, there is still a display advertising market, and it still pays, so there is still money to be had online for Heritage Media. But the lower numbers can only result in further constraints, speeding up the bleed from Heritage to New Media. It will force media companies to become more efficient, more quickly, with a real likelihood of some dying more quickly that we might have previously thought. If the advertising pie isn’t big enough, the game becomes scale, and quick, lean and efficient companies are the ones who are best placed to survive.

Search Ad Boom Bad News for Heritage Media? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Somehow Eva Mendes manages to make even chewing her toenails look incredibly hot. Italian Vogue pulled a wildly sexy photoshoot out of its European bag of tricks. It hasn’t been well-received by Americans per se, but it’s certainly worth a browse for the weirdness: cream-smearing, breast-squashing, mesh-licking goodness (NSFW Link Here).

A photoshoot this interesting will definitely help her in the ways of publicity for her newest project “Queen of the South,” or at least her support of Linked Against Leukemia. Some good’s got to come out of it, right?

Someone Has a Foot Fetish is a post from: The Inquisitr