Conde Nast Sells Fairchild To Penske

Condé Nast is selling Fairchild Fashion Media -- which publishes Women’s Wear Daily and Footwear News, among other fashion trade publications -- to Penske Media Corporation, publisher of Variety, according to Variety, which reported the news Tuesday afternoon.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the purchase price was rumored to be around $100 million, according to a separate report in The Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed source familiar with the deal. The transaction is expected to be complete in September of this year.

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The acquisition gives Penske control of a number of Fairchild properties, including the above-named fashion trade publications, M, Beauty Inc., and the Fairchild Summits events business. Two consumer brands also owned by Fairchild, Style.com and NowManifest, are not part of the deal and will remain with Condé Nast.

Fairchild Fashion Media president and CEO Gina Sanders is also staying on with Condé’s parent company Advance Publications, where she will assume a new role still to be designated.

The rumored sale price of $100 million compares with the $650 million Advance paid for it in 1999, reflecting the steep decline in value of print magazines in both the consumer and business-to-business categories.

Penske, which acquired Variety from Reed Elsevier in 2012, has been beefing up its core trade publications with new offerings and partnerships. In February, Variety joined forces with Univision Communications to create a new Spanish-language entertainment news brand, “Variety Latino – Powered by Univision.” Before that, Variety and Univision were already collaborating on a new short-form entertainment video feature for Univision’s “Primer Impacto” (First Impact) called “Variety en Primer Impacto.”

In 2013, Penske boss Jay Penske was rumored to be interested in acquiring Newsweek, the troubled newsweekly which later was bought by the International Business Times.

 
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