Scott Flanders is the president and CEO of Irvine-based, Orange County Register-owner Freedom Communications until July 1, when he becomes the first non-Hefner CEO of Playboy Enterprises. Folio, a magazine/online network for magazine and e-network professionals, did a breezy Q&A with Flanders recently, and what's interesting is what the Money Bunny did not say about his time at Freedom.
But first, in light of the possibly fatal woes being experienced at Register/Freedom, it's interesting to learn Flanders is still optimistic about print.
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FOLIO:: During the Playboy's last earnings call, interim CEO
Jerome Kern said the company was eying “radical” changes to the print
business model. What are your thoughts about turning that portion of
the business around?
Flanders:
I'm a big believer in print–particularly the viability for glossy
magazines. That reader experience can't and won't be duplicated online,
even where I see the reader technology moving. What Playboy is
confronting is an advertising recession. Playboy is having to shrink to
grow in the future. I don't believe the magazine has lost its
relevance. It's the largest read men's magazine in the world, including
the Web site that generates over 3 million unique visits per month
and almost 50 million page views. I believe the magazine will come back.
Shrink it to make it stronger? So that's what he was doing at
Freedom. He also famously tride to farm out production, copy editing
and other tasks to Third World countries. Perhaps his first Miss March
will hail from Myanmar.
More interesting is how Flanders DOES NOT answer what he is asked here:
FOLIO:: What about your experience at
Freedom Communications, and elsewhere throughout your career, has
prepared you to serve as chief executive at Playboy?
Flanders:
I have operated in the media business my entire career and have taken
on situations with businesses in transition. Everywhere I've gone I've
been a change agent. In 1999, I joined Columbia House, which was a $1.5
billion marketer of music and VHF tapes right before Napster was
released and DVDs emerged. We had a business that was over 50 years
old, that started in the same timeframe as Playboy, that needed to
migrate into the new model, including online. I think that singular
experience is most analogous to the opportunities for Playboy.
First, notice that Flanders does not even mention Freedom in his
answer. And Playboy shareholders are supposed to be encouraged that he
was at Columbia House right before other formats made it irrelevant?
Even before Playboy, Freedom and Columbia House, he showed an amazing
knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to one
anonymous commenter to the Folio interview:
Flanders is a bean counter–he has traditionally had little
connection to editorial content. Prior to working at Freedom, he was in
the book business in Indianapolis, squeezing out profit margins from a
dying business model. He is not a marketer, and I question he
understands the emerging online media markets.
What do they call the opposite of a turn-around artist?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.