Two years after bodybuilding legend and publisher Joe Weider sold his portfolio of seven health and fitness magazines to the owner of the National Enquirer, changes are afoot in the publication group’s Woodland Hills office.
American Media Inc., which purchased Weider Publications Inc. for $350 million, is eliminating 13 circulation employees and seven art and production positions from its Shape magazine office in Woodland Hills. The positions will now be based in New York.
Chief Executive David Pecker flew to Woodland Hills this month to announce the relocation and said in a written statement that the changes are part of an overall consolidation of operations.
“With more and more of our business being conducted out of our New York office, it made sense for AMI to consolidate these functions under one roof,” he said.
American Media also has been moving the National Enquirer to New York from its longtime Boca Raton, Fla., office. It has been retooling several of its publications, including the Enquirer.
American Media officials insist they don’t plan to close the operations at Woodland Hills, given the region’s status as a hub of bodybuilding and fitness. Muscle & Fitness, Muscle & Fitness Hers, Shape, Fit Pregnancy, Natural Health, and Flex are edited here. Men’s Fitness, another Weider publication, is edited in New York.
Still, they have created uncertainty, especially since the company laid off 80 back-office employees after the 2003 acquisition. Earlier this summer, Vince Scalisi, Muscle & Fitness’ top editor since 1986, left as part of a series of high-level editorial changes at the Weider group.
“They’ve been chipping away at the (Woodland Hills) team,” said a former editor of one of the Weider titles, speaking anonymously.
Samir Husni, chairman of the Journalism Department at the University of Mississippi, said he doesn’t expect American Media to uproot the Weider publications in a single stroke, but that more operations could move to New York.
“If your magazine is going to have any kind of advertising base, you have to have a strong presence in New York,” said Husni. “What AMI is doing is putting everything under one umbrella. American Media has made a lot of big investments lately, taken a lot of big gambles.”
Most recently, the company reported $86.8 million in operating income for fiscal year ended March 31, a 23.6 percent decline from the $113.6 million in the prior year.
The company attributed most of the decline to costs associated with the re-launch of its celebrity-oriented Star magazine. In addition, significant expenses have been incurred in the past year retooling the National Enquirer and Men’s Fitness, and launching Celebrity Living. (American Media is not publicly traded but reports earnings because it holds public debt.)
Standard & Poor’s analyst Hal Diamond said the changes have boosted advertising while improving the profitability of the Weider publications.
Weider created the predecessor of Muscle & Fitness, which now has a paid circulation of about 500,000, from his family home in Montreal when Weider was still a teenager.
Retired in L.A.’s Hancock Park district, Weider, now 82, still maintains an active interest in the publishing empire, including an informal consulting agreement with American Media, but he declined comment on any of the changes.
