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Barry Diller Admits Buying Newsweek Was A Mistake (FishbowlNY)
The “Most Honest And Unintentionally Depressing Answer Of The Day” award goes to Barry Diller, IAC’s chairman. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Diller admits that buying Newsweek was a mistake, and even adds that the all-digital NewsBeast isn’t likely to succeed: “For a news magazine, which is a bit of an odd phrase today, it was not possible to print it any longer. We said we will offer digital products. We have a very solid newsroom. We will see. I do not have great expectations. I wish I had not bought Newsweek. It was a mistake.” Bloomberg Businessweek IAC doesn’t officially disclose financial figures for the Newsweek/Daily Beast unit. A person with direct knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News in July the business would probably lose as much as $22 million in 2012. The publisher cut editorial jobs in December in an effort to hold down expenses.

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Who better to address the issue of Hollywood media consolidation than a veteran consolidator?

During an interview with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal, IAC head honcho Barry Diller acknowledged that his latest company is indeed an online media conglomerate. And that this same sort of structure on the Hollywood studio side has left an indelible, obvious footprint:

“One of the reasons I think movies kind of stink is because they’re now so low on the totem pole of greater corporate interests. It used to be… when I came to Fox, it was almost totally — it had maybe 20 percent of its revenue came from television — 80 percent came from film.”

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Billboard.biz, which was first a couple of weeks ago with news of BUZZMEDIA’s acquisition of SPIN magazine, has another related scoop late this afternoon. The inevitable layoffs have begun.

According to Billboard’s sources (and some corroborating tweets), among those being told to go the way of the vinyl LP are editor-in-chief Steve Kandell, website news editor Devon Maloney and several members of the production and photo teams. At press time, BUZZMEDIA had not responded to requests for comment. Earlier however, there was this:

Responding to questions about the future of SPIN‘s print side, BuzzMedia CEO Tyler Goldman released a statement saying “We believe there is a unique role for print and see it as another outlet for people to access content about their passion topics… In the longer term, we’re still defining how print fits in from a platform perspective.”

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After beta testing an offline events service in ten U.S. markets, Barry Diller’s ridiculously profitable match.com is ready to officially roll out “The Stir.”

Starting this month, U.S. subscribers and their friends will have the opportunity to connect in-person through localized group events. Per an article in Investor’s Business Daily, The Stir events will range from the casual (happy hour at a bar) to something more structured (a cooking class):

“There are 105 million singles in the U.S. and a significant number have not tried online dating,” Mandy Ginsberg, president of Match.com North America, told IBD. “We believe if we can get more people face to face through our singles events, we’re going to have much more success and get more people to try match.com.”

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It’s amazing what can happen after non-compete clauses in golden parachute and other high-level executive exit packages expire.

Consider the case of 61-year-old Ticketmaster founder Fred Rosen. Three decades after roiling the fan concert experience with those dreaded service fees, he’s back as partner of start-up Outbox Enterprises, a competitor started by a former Ticketmaster CFO. As he tells New York Times reporter Janet Morrissey, latest in a line of reporters drawn to the Rosen rebound story, the idea is to stick it to his former Ticketmaster-Live Nation front row mates:

Rosen wants to cut out the middleman by putting ticketing back in the hands of arenas, concert halls and clubs, helping venues use their own websites to sell tickets, merchandise, and services directly. For all its success, he says, Ticketmaster seems outdated: “Did I really think the model that I created 30 years ago would last for 30 years? Nothing lasts for 30 years,” Rosen said.

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At this point, what’s left to say? The recent news, via Ad Age, that Barry Diller majority-owned IAC has joined the content farm fray with something called The Writers Network is just one more reason for Southern California scribes to wave the tattered, bed sheet white flag.

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They were talking. Then they weren’t. They were thinking about doing something together, but those were really just rumors. Well, the truth finally comes out. Newsweek and The Daily Beast are tying the knot. Daily Beast editor-in-chief…well, and now Newsweek EIC too…Tina Brown broke the news last night on her site.

The Daily Beast’s animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary, weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, owned equally by Barry Diller’s IAC and Sidney Harman, owner (and savior) of Newsweek. As for me, I shall now be in the editor-in-chief’s chair at both The Daily Beast and Newsweek, bringing with us as CEO my Daily Beast business partner Stephen Colvin, who launched The Week Magazine in the U.S., as well as Maxim, as president of Dennis Publishing. His dynamism has created 66 new ad campaigns for us since I persuaded him to join The Daily Beast a year ago.

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Media titan Barry Diller had choice words for CEOs who are dealing with layoffs: essentially stop yer whining.

Diller told a Reuters summit: “The idea of a company that’s earning money, not losing money, that’s not, let’s say
‘industrially endangered,’ to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one’s counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it’s certainly not necessary. It’s doing it at the worst time. It’s throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.”

He saved some vitriol for Hollywood: “Margins used to be very good in the movie business. They’re now, what, 4, 5 percent in a decent year, so where’s the joy in that? Is there really a joy in ‘Superman 17′ or ‘Iron Man 2′?”

…and its CEOs: “‘Mogul’ is yesterday. It just doesn’t apply. You use the word ‘mogul’ and what you do is conjure up the fantasy, the memory of when there were actual movie moguls who made their decisions, believed in what they did, were outsized personalities. There’s no outsized personalities in the movie business anymore.”

Jody Rosen writes a piece in Slate about his uncovering a plagiarist at the Montgomery County Bulletin.

But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend-or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.

Yeah and Margaret B. Jones is the new kind of gangster…

Dan Cox, on special assignment for FishbowlLA, covering the 2008 Sun Valley Media Conference.

As studio chairmen and agency heads all attempt to escape the jowls of Hollywood and its labor problems, the Screen Actors Guild has a bright marketing executive. SAG bought an full-page ad in the local paper for Sun Valley, the Idaho Mountain Express, that said simply: “We Want a Deal.”

It was aimed at the studio heads up here, including Universal’s Ron Meyer, DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer, Disney’s Robert Iger and agency senior executives like ICM’s Jeff Berg, CAA’s Richard Lovett and Bryan Lourd, UTA’s Jim Berkus and William Morris Agency’s Jim Wiatt.

Unfortunately for SAG, as Sony chairman Stringer told mediabistro: “Unfortunately for the Screen Actors Guild, we don’t see that newspaper up here. It’s not delivered to us.”

Also seen in the valley: IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller who had to stop riding his bike after almost running into Wendi Deng, wife to billionaire media mogul Rupert.

“Where are you going, Wendi,” Diller asks.
“I’m going to get some Yoga pants,” she replies.
“What are yogurt pants?” Diller persists.
“No, yoga pants, you know to do yoga in.”
“Yogurt pants?”

Hubby Rupert was later cornered by an AP reporter who asked about the markets. Murdoch’s simple yet eloquent reply: “I’m a bear.”