Longtime chairman and CEO of American Media Inc., David Pecker, has been brought to meadow, and AMI, the parent company of The National Enquirer, will soon cease to exist and merge with a company that markets face masks, hand sanitizers, gloves, disinfectant wipes, and vitamin supplements.
“This is a transformative event that significantly transforms Accelerate and American Media into a new type of media and marketing company with an unusual reach to the sales floor,” said a press release issued last Friday by Georgia-based marketing executive David Parry, CEO of Accelerate360, LLC.
Parry added that longtime AMI exec Chris Scardino has been appointed president of the new hybrid tabloid journalism-marketing venture, which, months before the October 1 planned launch, was already trying to carry out one of its astonishing business synergies: According to people familiar with the situation have posted AMI magazines photos of celebrities wearing sports face masks, contrast display ads for COVID masks sold and distributed by Accelerate360.
Friday’s announcement – noting that AMI will change its name to A360 Media, a subsidiary of a company that claims to be the nation’s largest distributor of products, including “3 million square feet of warehouse space” equipped with state -or the art warehouse technology ”- came as yet another unusual surprise for hundreds of AMI employees.
In March, employees were forced to take a 23 percent compensation because the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, and they now have to suffer a downgrade in their health insurance coverage, according to employees interviewed by The Daily Beast, while their job security is becoming increasingly uncertain.
“We all feel terrible right now,” an AMI staffer told The Daily Beast. ‘We’ve all been through a lot of mergers already and when they talk about‘ duplicate features ’and‘ synergy ’, I think automatic dismissals. I can not even understand what this looks like. ‘
A second employee said: “This means almost no chance that pay will be returned to pre-pandemic levels. It looks like Pecker is gone and we’re all happy about that, but questions remain or will be dismissed if this new company takes control. ”
The nearly 69-year-old Pecker, who armed the during the last presidential campaign Applicant and other AMI publications to help his then-colleague Donald Trump and attack Trump’s opponents have been “effectively” cut short for the role of executive adviser, a hot business name for kibbutzim.
As federal prosecutors investigate false violations of campaign finance laws that stemmed from AMI’s $ 150,000 payment in 2016 to an earlier Playboy model to buy the rights to publish her claim but never publish that she had an affair with Trump, Pecker and his sidekick, the Australian import Dylan Howard, signed an immunity action that required them to cooperate with the feds. A woman who answered the phone at Pecker’s Greenwich, Connecticut, estate on Friday claimed she did not know who he was.
‘It’s unbelievable. What a grizzly end, ”one former AMI employee told The Daily Beast. ‘It’s a long sad history of mismanagement from the top of someone who never understood what these magazines were about. Pecker’s so-called friendship with Trump turned out to be the kiss of death.
The press release – which does not mention that Chatham Asset Management, the hedge fund that AMI owns, also has a substantial stake in Accelerate360 – lists such AMI titles as Us weekly, Life and style, OK!, en Men’s Journal, but does not mention the one Applicant.
In April 2019, AMI had announced with great fanfare that Hudson News owner Jimmy Cohen had agreed to buy the purchase Applicant for $ 100 million – a claim that was greeted with widespread skepticism by media observers and now proves to be untrue.
Leaving the supermarket tabloid’s press release, which saw kiosk sales of more than four million copies a week before Pecker received it two decades ago to about 100,000 now, has prompted observers to ask whether the new company – after the October 1 merger — Plans to publish the once influential one Applicant founded by the larger-than-life Generoso Pope Jr.
“I have been saddened for the last twenty years by the ever-increasing decline of the National Enquirer in both editorial and sales,” the former Applicant Editor-in-Chief and President Iain Calder emailed The Daily Beast in response to Friday’s news. “Frankly, the management understood the unique qualities that helped us sell up to 5 million copies per week in the three decades before the hands changed around the year 2000.”
Calder added: ‘If the new owners know how to take up some of the past secrets of circulation, I’ll be extremely happy. If not, then c’est la vie. I just know I was proud of a publication that once got the attention of all of North America and made 25 million readers a little happier every week. ”
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