• NY Post, Wednesday, November 16, 2005 12:45 PM

The New York Post's Keith Kelly notes midway down his Media Ink column today that "It looks like Rachael Ray, the quirky and popular Food Channel chef who is a favorite of Oprah Winfrey, has a smash hit with her new magazine." The book, Every Day With Rachael Ray, was launched last month--amid plenty of problems, reports Kelly--by the Reader's Digest Association. RDA has not exactly been a launch factory in recent years, focusing instead on maintaining readers for its core title, which has been slipping in the U.S. for decades. Several magazines RDA developed internally never got out of the building, so the success of the Rachael Ray title represents a major success for the Pleasantville, N.Y.-based company. Quoting Kelly: "Yesterday, the company said it was selling out and had gone back to press for another 138,000 copies, bringing the total number of copies in print to just under 1 million." The food-cooking category has proved to be a strong one for RDA. Its acquisition of Reiman Publishing several years ago is widely seen as a shrewd move. Reiman specializes in producing low-cost (in some cases ad-free) consumer magazines about food and shelter.

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