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Gore & Hyatt taking media company public
The media company co-founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt five years ago plans to go public.
Current Media, which operates a TV network and a web site aimed at young audiences, notified the SEC of its intentions today.
The company launched Current TV in 2005. The TV network now has about 51 million subscriber households, according to SEC documents. (Story continues below interactive map.)
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Current Media also unveiled a website, Current.com, in October 2007. Combined revenues in 2007 were $63.8 million, with losses of $6.1 million. Gore, Hyatt and programming president David Neuman each received salary and bonuses of about $1 million in 2007.Current Media aims to fill what it describes as a programming gap for young adults. “Young adults need and want news and information about what is going on in their world; however, they have not had a news and information source on TV that speaks to them,” the company said.
The SEC documents underscored Gore’s importance in the venture, particularly in relationships with key distributors. However, the company said, “Mr. Gore has a number of other commitments that limit the amount of time he can devote to our business.”
Gore’s many commitments include being a director of Apple, a partner at Kleiner Perkins and chairman of Generation Investment Management, which invests in green companies. While his time is limited, his connections have obviously paid off. Gore is also an adviser to Google, which supplies content to Current Media.
Yet he isn’t the only high-profile personality in the company. Co-founder Joel Hyatt founded Hyatt Legal Services and recently became a director of Hewlett-Packard.
Billionaire Ron Burkle, a close friend of Bill Clinton, is a director of Current Media, as is investment banker Richard C. Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Read related stories: Business · Media
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Boeing and Lockheed Join Forces on Bomber Project
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Henry Louis Gates Heads New Washington Post Site
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Tamara Mellon Sues Mother Over Jimmy Choo Stock
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Wexner’s prize, Victoria’s Secret
While visiting his West Coast Limited stores in the late 1970s, Leslie Wexner was intrigued by a shop that sold women’s underwear. It was called Victoria’s Secret.
It was brothel Victorian, he once said in an interview. Not erotic, but very sexy.
Wexner, who left his family’s general clothing store to specialize in women’s casual wear, saw the possibilities. He bought the store and catalog in 1982 for $1 million. (Story continues below interactive map.)
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In 2007, Victoria’s Secret accounted for more than half of Limited Brands nearly $9.5 billion in revenue. Wexner is a multi-billionaire with strong ties to the arts (Wexner Center for the Arts and the Wexner Prize), philanthropy (Wexner Foundation) and Ohio State University.
Wexner is a trustee of the University and Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee is a director of Limited Brands. The Wexner Center is located at the University. Wexner’s wife, Abigail Wexner, a Barnard-educated lawyer and community activist, is also on the Limited Brands board.
Limited Brands’s other stores include Bath & Body Works, La Senza, C.O. Bigelow, Henri Bendel and the White Barn Candle Co.
Loyal customers swear the Victoria’s Secret bras fit better (that troublesome strap never strays) and while many will still go to Costco to buy practical, everyday underwear, they go to Victoria’s Secret for special occasions.
One such customer is Orange County, Calif., civil engineer Agnes Villanueva, 46. She introduced this writer to Victoria’s Secret several years ago and once picked up half a dozen cotton thongs as an unusual party favor. Her guests were middle-aged women she met at a private Catholic school in the 1970s.
By email, Villanueva recently explained her motivation: “Wearing sexy, skimpy, almost non-existent underwear was such a taboo. We were raised to be modest and conservative, but I wanted to encourage that naughty beast in each of us to break free.”
Sexy sophisticate is more what Wexner had in mind when he invented the story of Victoria as the fictional founder of the store and conceived of her as finely bred lady of French and English descent. Her lingerie reflected that refinement.
And Wexner gambled on women paying a little more money for the cache of a “brand” name, one equated with quality, beauty and comfort. That gamble paid off for the company and for him. Forbes lists Wexner’s net worth at $2.8 billion.
Read related stories: Business · Philanthropy
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Judith Regan settles suit with News Corp.
Judith Regan may have published a book with a dull last chapter. It doesn’t make for good reading, but it would seem worth her while.
Regan’s sensation-filled lawsuit against News Corp. and HarperCollins has been settled for an undisclosed amount, Regan and her adversaries announced Friday.
Both sides aren’t saying much, and lots of questions raised by the lawsuit, a document that read like a novel with a heroine (Regan) and quite a few villains, remain unanswered.
Regan, who had published hundreds of authors and made millions in the process, had sued the companies in November for $100 million. (Story continues below interactive map.)
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She had alleged that she had been wrongly terminated in December 2006. She also claimed that she had been made to seem anti-Semitic and that she had been forced to withhold information about Rudy Giuliani that might damage his presidential campaign.When the lawsuit was filed, a News Corp. spokesman dismissed Regan’s claims as “preposterous.”
On Friday, News Corp. issued what amounted to an apology.
“After carefully considering the matter, we accept Ms. Regan’s position that she did not say anything that was anti-Semitic in nature, and further believe that Ms. Regan is not anti-Semitic,” it said in a statement.
Regan, too, issued a statement.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked with so many gifted people and am looking forward to my next venture,” she said.
And that was that. The other allegations in the lawsuit aren’t addressed.
No mention was made of the Regan’s claim that she was told not to disclose damaging information about Giuliani that she had learned while dating Bernard Kerik, a Giuliani associate and former New York City police commissioner who is now under indictment.
Unmentioned, too, is Regan’s charge that she was unfairly made the scapegoat for the bad publicity generated by her project with O.J. Simpson.
Regan had planned on publishing the former football’s star’s “hypothetical” account of how he would have murdered his wife if he had murdered his wife.
In the face of adverse publicity, HarperCollins canceled the publication. Regan alleged that the company had supported the project and then abandoned her when the going got tough.
“As a result of this corporate shirking of responsibility, false representations and defamation, Regan was unfairly attacked worldwide for her involvement in the O.J. project,” the lawsuit claimed. “She received death threats, hate mail and was shunned, humiliated and caused great harm.”
Other questions remain unanswered:
Did her bosses at HarperCollins neglect to take care of Regan’s office? It reportedly had no air conditioning in the summer and too much heat in the winter.
Did those same bosses fail to investigate “serious security breaches” which led to a light fixture crashing onto Regan’s desk?
Did those bosses do nothing when Regan complained that people within the company were attributing her rise in the company to sexual activities?
Followers of this real-life legal drama may never know.
One of her lawyers suggested to The Wall Street Journal that Regan doesn’t want to look back.
“It is better for her to get on with her life,” said Bert Fields.
Read related stories: Law · Media
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Bradbury Nomination is Torturous
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Echoes of Camelot As a Kennedy Endorses Obama
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Rumsfeld proposes U.S. propaganda agency
Donald Rumsfeld has returned to the spotlight, promoting an idea that got him into hot water when he ran the Defense Department.
In his first major speech since departing the Bush administration in 2006, Rumsfeld pushed for a new propaganda agency to combat the anti-U.S. rhetoric emanating from Muslim countries and to burnish the American image abroad. He said the U.S. needs an agency bigger and better than the old United States Information Agency, the Cold War-era operation that was absorbed into the State Department. (Story continues below interactive map.)
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“We need someone in the United States government, some entity, not like the old USIA,” Rumsfeld said in a conference here Wednesday sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.“I think this agency, a new agency has to be something that would take advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information … The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities,” he said.
The U.S. government, he said, currently does not “with any systematic organized way attempt to engage the battle of ideas and talk about the idea of beheading, and what’s it’s about and what it means and talk about the fact that people are killing more Muslims than they are non-Muslims, these extremists.
“They’re doing it with suicide bombs and the like. We need to engage and not simply be passive and allow that battle of competition of ideas,” Rumsfeld said, according to a transcript provided by Wired News.
In the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld created just such an agency when he was defense secretary, under the direction of then-Under Secretary Douglas Feith.
Known as the Office of Strategic Influence, the agency’s mission, in part, was reportedly planting misleading stories in foreign media. Lawmakers expressed concerns that those types of propaganda efforts, which had all the traits of military psychological operations, would undermine rather than promote U.S. interests abroad.
Under pressure, Rumsfeld announced in February 2002 that the agency had been shut down.
If there was any irony in Rumsfeld’s attendance this week at the conference it was this: The company L-3 Communications sponsored an “invitation only” luncheon with the former defense secretary. L-3 Communications owns Titan Corp., which did severe damage to the U.S. image aboard when a handful of its translators were implicated in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Contact: eric@muckety.com
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2 Comments
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#1. Larry 01.25.2008
Let me guess, Rummy would call this agency the Ministry of Truth…
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#2. Rob H 01.27.2008
Why is Rumsfeld relevant? Go back to your golf game, you old man. You were a failure. Thanks for the billion dollars a day we are spending now in a stupid war based on your lies.
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