Keith Kelly has a column chock full o' news this morning, about who's coming and who's going at various outfits around town. most interesting (and surprising) was the announcement that the NYT's Richard Siklos, he of the lifetime beat, who is jumping to Fortune come August. Big hire for Fortune, big loss for theTimes, and big shot across the bow at Portfolio, which has seen a drop in ad pages for its second issue, due out in September. A media-buyer client told Crain's reporter Matthew Flamm that advertisers had "expected a more hard-hitting, substantive business environment, and what they got was a fashion-centric, business-as-background type of Condé Nast title." The Siklos hire is a signal that Fortune is about the former. Kelly reports that Fortune has also hired Business Week's Jessi Hempel and TheStreet.com's award-winning Peter Eavis.
Kelly also reports on more firings at the Daily News, this time "longtime veteran" website editor Kevin Hayes, the "third top editor to get the ax in the last three weeks" according to Kelly. The news also cut longtime columnist Lenore Skenazy loose six months ago, in a move that Kelly also linked to budget-cutting and newsroom-demoralizing. Then again, the New York Post isn't what one would call "objective" on the subject of the Daily News, but still. Many firings do not suggest future good tidings (cought Time Inc. cough). Finally, the kicker: Star magazine has hired dating columnist/ETP contributor/Gawker fodder Julia Allison as editor-at-large to replace Jill Dobson, who was recently snapped up by Fox, for a reputed pretty penny. While Gawker commenters are currently plotzing, they shouldn't be surprised: Allison (who is a friend of ETP, obvs) has been not-so-quietly racking up the TV appearances over the past few months, on topics from Paris Hilton's continuing relevance to the viability of a Bloomberg candidacy, and looks well-poised to travel Dobson's footsepts over to Fox eventually, given her frequent appearances on Hannity & Colmes, John Gibson, Neil Cavuto, RedEye Fox & Friends, and the morning "Mike & Juliet" show on Fox 5 (never mind Showbiz Tonight on CNN and Scarborough Country on MSNBC). The repeat business on a range of topics far beyond those grounded in her written work shows that Allison knows how to bring it for the camera, reliably and effecively (even at the ungodly early hours required for morning TV). That kind of on-camera savvy is showbiz, and the aggregate of those across-the-dial TV appearances nets the kind of exposure that would cost Star way, way more than they are laying out for Allison, even if her reputed salary is exorbitant by journalist standards.
It is also a harbinger of the cross-platform-izing of print, and why it's helpful to be camera-ready in addition to having winsome prose (who saw Adam Moss on Charlie Rose last night, by the way? Somewhere up in some attic, there's a portrait of him looking his age). This is why Allison personifies the media 'triple threat': Someone who can write, looks good for the camera, and can think quickly on her feet.* The reach of TV is staggering, and the power of the five-second beam into thousands, or millions, of living rooms (at least) tops print in sheer efficiency, and arguably, sheer, blunt, brand-promulgating power (a mega-spokesperson for a Maga-Brand, as TV ready Men's Health EIC/brand-personifier/Julia-pal David Zinczenko might say). So those who are surprised by Allison's rise should not be; in this brave new multi-platform world of ours, it pays to be a utility players. How this links back to Siklos, Fortune, and Portfolio I'm not so sure, but there's got to be a moral in there somewhere.
*Gawker notes that Allison herself has said she prefers TV to writing because it takes less effort — even so, that doesn't mean that she can't write; she can, and does, and very engagingly to our minds, though of course we're biased.