New Conde Nast boss Roger Lynch comes from Pandora and Sling.
Conde Nast is the company behind some of the world’s most glamorous and influential magazines, including Vogue, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. It is also a company in decline, because the magazine business is in decline.Roger Lynch’s job is to somehow stop that.“It is a difficult job,” he said today, after Conde announced that Lynch, who has no magazine experience, would be the company’s new CEO. “But that’s what attracted me to it. There were other things I was looking at that were more in my wheelhouse, more in my comfort zone, but I like not being in my comfort zone.”That’s the right thing to say. But it is hard to say what Lynch can do that his predecessor, Bob Sauerberg, hasn’t tried to do during his tenure — or what any of the big magazine publishers, who find themselves in a similar predicament, have tried to do.The magazine industry is in decline because the magazine industry’s core product — packaging stories and ads and presenting them together in a discrete bundle — is in decline, for an obvious reason: Readers and advertisers are more interested in spending their time and money in other ways.
That’s why Time Inc., perhaps the best-known magazine publisher, recently sold itself at a discount to rival Meredith, which then turned around and started selling off some of Time’s best-known publications, including Time magazine and Fortune....MORE
