Keith J. Kelly - Media Ink
Sales of Cathie Black's business memoir, "Basic Black," have spiked since Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled his decision last week to tap the media executive as the new chancellor of the Department of Education.
"There's no question her appointment has had an impact at retail," said Stuart Appelbaum, a spokesman for Random House Inc., which published the book in 2007 through its Crown/Business imprint. He said sales are up 400 percent in New York City since the surprise announcement that she was picked to succeed outgoing chancellor Joel Klein, who is headed to the News Corp. board (parent company of The Post).
The book, when it first appeared, was helped through excerpts in Hearst magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine, and by Black's appearance on Oprah Winfrey's talk show.
The book also rankled some of the Hearst brass at the time, who felt Black was being too self promotional while the magazine empire of Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Red Book and Marie Claire was starting to show some signs of stress.
The book sold "more than 130,000 copies," according to Applebaum and ended up becoming a national bestseller. Sales of the paperback which hit in 2008, were a little more tepid.
To-do list
Tina Brown, the incoming editor-in-chief of Newsweek Daily Beast Co., has been trying to calm worried staffers primarily on the Newsweek side of the proposed merger between Sidney Harman's Newsweek and the Barry Diller-owned Daily Beast.
Today, Brown is slated to journey to the embattled Washington, D.C., bureau of Newsweek where Bureau Chief Jeff Bartholet had already announced he was leaving. Brown had hired media critic Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post weeks ago and installed him as the bureau chief of the Daily Beast.
Sources say that Brown would also like Evan Thomas to do more writing for the magazine.
In August, long before the merger talk surfaced, the veteran editor-at-large, with 25 years experience on the weekly, was one of the high-profile people to say they would exit.
He agreed to do a few long pieces per year while he teaches at Princeton and works on a bio of President Dwight Eisenhower.
Said Thomas via e-mail: "I will not be at the meeting. I have told Sidney that I will write six pieces a year (the first is in the magazine this week). I have not heard from Tina."
Brown's bigger problem may be trying to quell the panic in the ranks that erupted at Newsweek.com when a report surfaced late last week that it was going to be shut down.
Brown was quick to try to stamp out that brushfire as quickly as possible. Last Friday, she tweeted: "Woah! Newsweek.com's superb content will live on under its own banner & in URLs on the new site. Not shutting down, combining."
Brown dispatched the Daily Beast's Tom Watson to meet with worried Newsweek.com staffers on Wednesday to further try to calm nerves, Joe Pompeo was reporting on Yahoo! News. Although nothing concrete emerged, Watson was basically telling staffers "to sit tight and don't panic," he quoted one staffer as saying.
Brown was at the National Book Awards on Wednesday night at Cipriani Wall Street where she gave the keynote address to introduce "Bonfire of the Vanities" author Tom Wolfe, who, in a lengthy address, reminisced about his days in daily journalism at the Springfield Union, the Washington Post and the Herald Tribune.
The Daily Beast also sponsored the after-party, but Brown did not stick around for the festivities which went until after 1 a.m.
Among the invited guests on hand was Maer Roshan, who was famously raided from his job at New York to take on the task of trying to save the ill-fated Talk, Tina's last magazine. Roshan, who saw his own Radar magazine crash and burn three times, was quick to spike talk that he was hooking up with Brown again. "I love work ing with Tina, but at the moment I'm happily pursuing my own projects," he said.
The tentative pact that was signed to merge Beast and Newsweek was unveiled last Friday. One source said the deal might be finalized by early December, although no firm date has been put out. The new team has pledged only "modest cuts" but the anticipation is that most of the cuts will come from the Newsweek side in part because previous owner Washington Post Company will be picking up some of the severance costs.
Said one insider, "I think they are just getting down to brass tacks to try to come up with a plan."
Final cut
Staffers at Bloomberg BusinessWeek who made the move after the sale of the weekly by McGraw-Hill Companies last year are nervously watching the calendar.
Any of the surviving staffers who made the move will still collect severance from McGraw-Hill provided they are downsized or laid off on or before Dec. 1 -- the one-year anniversary of the $9 million sale.
Several weeks ago, three were laid off in the Bloomberg BusinessWeek online operation -- Patricia O'Connell, Will Andrews and Phil Mintz, but nobody knows if that was the final cut or not.
kkelly@nypost.com
Nypost.com
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