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Get in Ed's BELLAY!
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Hora de Feliz...
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...in the ciudad of angels!
Ed will host his next Los Angeles event at 7:30pm June 20 at the esteemed dive bar, St. Nick's Restaurant and Pub. All those in the mood for Bud Lite and burgers should RSVP to losangeles@ed2010.com by June 19. For more information, go to http://losangeles.citysearch.com/profile/11518878/los_angeles_ca/st_nicks_pub_restaurant_and_bar.html

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News
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1. WWD
Memo Pad: Tough Bargaining ... Baby Boom
By Jeff Bercovici
6/13/06
http://www.wwd.com/issue/article/107030?page=1

TOUGH BARGAINING: Is Bonnie Fuller destined to rejoin the ranks of the six-figure slobs? Fuller's contract with American Media Inc., where she has been editorial director since 2003, expires at the end of the month, and a new one has yet to materialize. While negotiations are moving ahead, sources say her boss, AMI chairman David Pecker, has balked at an extension of her current deal.

Fuller's contract provides her with $1.5 million per year in base salary, plus bonuses tied to the newsstand performance of Star magazine and other titles. Fuller was guaranteed a bonus of $500,000 in 2004 as an incentive for leaving her job at Us Weekly, but in 2005, she earned only $74,851 in bonus pay, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The trend in Star's single-copy sales suggests she won't be earning much in incentives for 2006, either. Almost all of Star's May and June issues have sold fewer than 700,000 copies on the newsstand, according to competitors' projections, compared with 863,508 in the second half of 2005.

BABY BOOM: Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt's debut appearance on newsstands yielded a major bump for People — and a good thing, too, considering the magazine reportedly paid more than $4 million for the honor. The current issue, with the first photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's newborn girl, is on pace to sell between 2 million and 2.2 million copies, according to an estimate by a source with access to checkout data. In recent years, only People's year-end double issues have sold at that level; a typical weekly issue sells 1.5 million. The spike is especially notable in that this issue's cover price was increased by 50 cents, to $3.99. Nor does the increase appear to have come at the expense of People's competitors. The current issue of Us is on track to sell about 975,000 copies, while In Touch will sell more than 1 million. Star appears headed for a total of about 675,000 — well below its 2005 average, but, as noted above, consistent with its recent performance.

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The editor-in-chief can breathe a sigh of relief with last Monday's (June 5) naming of Cond? Nast Portfolio because "I am not being besieged by 'that question' anymore." Yet, that is Lipman's only discomfort in the nine-months-and-counting transi­tion from the very tangible Wall Street Journal--she was its first advertising columnist (1989) and launched Weekend Journal (1998), Personal Journal (2001), and the Saturday edition (last September, just before she left for CNP)--to an intangible multimedia business project with president David Carey that, name notwithstanding, remains a work in progress. The now widely reported CNP debut will not be until April 2007, and "full throttle" (monthly frequency for CNP, etc.) will not come until that September.

Lipman, who dealt with daily deadlines at the WSJ for 22 years (both as writer and, in her last stop, as deputy managing editor), does not mind the "wait." "I love the challenge of creating a new product," she says. "Yes, I did it at the WSJ, and I enjoyed it, but there it was with an existing staff. Hiring people here and all of us going through the process together is adding an exciting new dimension. It is also terrific that at Cond? Nast, editors get a lot of latitude. I knew that about David from his years at The New Yorker [vp/publisher from June 1998 through September 2005], and his respect for 'church/state.' That was a real draw for me to come here, and it will also be for others, as I am being swamped with r?sum?s from writers and editors with extra­ordinary talent. We are going to have exciting staff announcements." One business subject presumably out of bounds at CNP is CN, which Lipman profiled on the front page of the January 11, 1996, WSJ. (Definitely makes her unique from Graydon Carter, David Remnick, and Anna Wintour.) "It was on the financials of a privately held company [she was the first to do an 'authorized' analysis of CN chairman S.I. Newhouse, Jr.'s bottom line], not on the editorial, which I've always respected." This Thursday (June 15): Lipman's first in a series of CNP "preview" luncheons/interviews with Google ceo Eric Schmidt at New York's Four Seasons restaurant.

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Wherein Media Guy asks repeat offenders in the media world to give us a break already.

Leno Podcast: $1.99 for this?

Would it kill you, Time Inc., to get off your high horse and stop pretending that making donations to charity to secure exclusive celebrity pictures isn't the moral equivalent of paying sources? First, earlier this year, People cut a reported $400,000 check to one of Angelina Jolie's favorite charities to get a cover shot of her pregnant. Then, just over a week ago, in a deal brokered by Getty Images, the magazine reportedly donated more than 10 times that amount to other Jolie-endorsed charities to secure shots of the actual spawn. I'm sorry, but if there's a check being written that benefits a news figure or that news figure's designated beneficiary, it's checkbook journalism, pure and simple.

Would it kill you, NBC, to actually think through what you're doing in the viral-video space? Earlier this year, the network started demanding that sites like YouTube take down clips from its shows-even though YouTube's distribution of the Andy Samberg/Chris Parnell digital short "Lazy Sunday" is credited with single-handedly reviving buzz about "Saturday Night Live." Last week, NBC launched a $1.99-a-day Jay Leno monologue-and-sketch iTunes video service. Instead of nickel-and-diming hard-core fans of Leno and other NBC shows (fewer than 200,000 clips from various NBC shows are reportedly sold or given away through iTunes each month), the network could be offering a sampling opportunity to millions of potential viewers. It's pointless and shortsighted to try to put a short leash on viral video.

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Joe Salvatore stood outside of Housing Works Book Caf?, trying to figure out how to carry five heavy bags stuffed with 80 literary journals. On a normal day, a haul that big would have cost him more than $1,000. On Sunday, he paid only $160, thanks to the discount offered at the Seventh Annual Literary Magazine Fair.

The magazine fair, offering more than 120 literary journals for only $2 each, was part of this weekend's Literary Magazine Magathon, which also included a Saturday afternoon reading in the DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Room of the New York Public Library's main branch.

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