Since he took over HFMUS in September 2008, Mr. Lemarchand sold five magazines and closed one, Metropolitan Home, according to Nat Ives. He also withdrew the company's membership from the Magazine Publishers of America. He was also around for the rise of Elle at the hands of Carol Smith and, later, the departure of Carol Smith to Condé Nast. He will move into a senior management position with Lagardere.

Mr. Parr (who hails from Canada) has experience in book publishing, magazines and the multimedia digital space, too. He was most recently president of Source Interlink Media. He will have a fresh start at Hachette, as the company is in the middle of a move from 1633 Broadway to new space in the Time-Life tower.

The announcement is appropriate today, the last day of summer, after a season of change on the executive floor at magazine publishers across the City: Jack Griffin took over at Time Inc.; David Carey took over at Hearst; and Bob Sauerberg took over at Condé Nast.

Today The Wall Street Journal takes a look at media companies in the middle of real estate moves. And what better time to bring up The New York Times' financial situation.

The Wall Street Journal now occupies space in the News Corp. building in midtown. News Corp. acquired Journal publisher Dow Jones in 2007, and last year moved the company out of its downtown offices.

Unlike many of their peers, the New York Times Co. and Forbes stayed put. But both now are tenants in space they used to own after their owners sold part or all of their buildings.

Businessweek will leave Rockefeller Center this month and head east to Bloomberg headquarters on Lexington Avenue.

Hachette Filipacchi is moving from 50th and Broadway to the Time & Life building.

Last month, the publisher of The Economist moved to 750 Third Avenue, where it will share offices with editors and executives from Reader's Digest.

“The goal of this online community, which functions like Facebook,” read the memo, “is to bring us closer together and establish new relationships.”

HFM U.S. is a far-flung company, both physically (its parent company, Lagardere, is headquartered in France) and intellectually—brands range from fashion and design (Elle) to homemaking (Woman’s Day) to automotive (Car and Driver). If everything goes according to plan, these diverse employees will soon be sharing status updates, links to amusing articles and SFW photos!

For the time being, participation in the as-yet-unnamed network (Filipacchi and Friends? Hachetter?), which is still in beta, appears to be voluntary—and grudging. “The idiocy is mind-blowing,” one staff member wrote to us via email. “As if we need more distractions during our workday. Good lord.”

Why not simply use an existing social media platform like, say, Facebook?

A spokesperson for the company declined to comment. But building one’s own network of interoffice amis will give HFM a larger degree of control over its content and design than the company would have on somebody else’s platform. And if it doesn’t work out, c’est la vie! “Failure is a key component of reinvention and a rich resource for learning,” read one email to staffers about the initiative. “We will view failure not as a loss but rather as another way to move forward, a very useful and at times necessary process to future successes.”

HFM’s foray into internecine social media coincides with a broader reorganization at the company. As The Observer reported back in December, HFM is on the verge of trading its current office space at 1633 Broadway for cozier quarters at the Time-Life tower at 1271 Avenue of the Americas. Office relocation can be disruptive. Social networks can be reassuring. Perhaps the investment in digital collegiality will help ease the transition. “Because of the current state of our industry,” read the email announcement to staffers, “the greatest risk would be not to take risks.”

fgillette@observer.com

More: Times Scores a PR win in WSJ Battle >

But do people really want to read magazines on their iPhones? Maybe not, reports The Business Insider. Neither the Esquire nor GQ iPhone apps have broken into Apple's top 100.

T.B.I. hashes out potential issues with the magazine apps' pricing and promotion, but the final problem discussed—SIZE—seems like the most important. At this point, at least, peering at stuff on your phone is not a reading experience that feels much like leafing through a big perfumed glossy.

Magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi is planning to trade its too-capacious offices at the Paramount Group’s 1633 Broadway for more recession-friendly offices less than half the size at the Time-Life tower two blocks east, according to multiple industry sources.

The publisher of Elle magazine has a sublease out for 120,000 square feet in the space that Lehman Brothers used to sublet from Time at 1271 Avenue of the Americas, which is owned by Rockefeller Group Development Corp.

This comes about eight months after the New York Post reported that Hachette was looking to cut costs by finding better-priced offices. Call it providence or plain good judgment, but the publisher is timing its move wisely. The Manhattan office market has seen far rosier days, and the over-abundance of space, coupled with the paucity of tenants, means that Hachette is bound to get a relatively cheap rent in a relatively top-notch office building.

The publisher is also saving money by taking drastically less space. Right now, Hachette has a lease expiring in the beginning of 2011 for about 280,000 square feet at the Broadway tower, more than twice as much as it is taking on along Sixth Avenue. Hachette declined to comment for this story, as did Newmark Knight Frank’s Fred Trump, who is representing the publisher in negotiations, and Studley’s Howard Nottingham, who is representing sublessor Time.

drubinstein@observer.com

Hachette has about 280,000 square feet at its current location, but is on the market for something less than 250,000.

Among the options it’s considering: staying put at the Paramount Group’s 1633 Broadway; relocating to Worldwide Plaza at 825 Eighth Avenue, the enormous and largely empty edifice recently bought by George Comfort & Sons; and moving to 777 Third Avenue, the William Kaufman Organization’s 38-story rascacielos at the corner of 49th Street.

Newmark Knight Frank broker Fred Trump, who is representing the magazine publisher, would only say, “There are other buildings in the mix.” Hachette did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
drubinstein@observer.com

Hachette spokeswoman Anne Janas told us there was "no truth" to the report, and sent us this statement:

Following an article published today in The New York Post, Lagardère Active, HFM U.S. parent company, formally denies being in negotiation with Hearst Corp Group. There are no ongoing talks on a joint venture or licensing agreement with Hearst Corp Group regarding ELLE magazine in the U.S.

As Mr. Bercovici writes:

“About ten years,” she said. “And it’ll probably be another ten.” She rolled her eyes.

“God!” I thought. “It wasn’t just a paranoid fantasy, people in New York actually do have to live in sheds now.” Then my haze of insanity lifted and I realized that the question was, “how long have you been at Hachette?”—as in Hachette Filipacchi Media, the French conglomerate that employs many of us at 1633 Broadway.

Sheds were on my mind because right before I’d left the office, I’d had a tear-stained phone conversation with my husband that ended with my saying “Yeah, and then maybe they’ll let us live in a 300–square-foot shed in their backyard!” I had called him to calm what felt like the beginnings of a massive anxiety attack, upon hearing the gossip from a real-estate agent at an open house: the actors Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal were buying the four-story brownstone near Fifth Avenue in North Park Slope. The untouched-by-time, old-lady house of my dreams.

I want an old-lady house the way some people want to write a bestseller or have a baby. If I were a G.I. Jane doll, I would squawk, “Original detail! Original detail!” when my cord was pulled. I’ve come to believe that if I could just lasso my 30-year fixed around a dusty, dilapidated, circa 1850 to 1900 brownstone, near an express subway, and not more than 30 minutes to midtown, with knob-and-tube wiring, caked-on lead paint, tiny glass-fronted kitchen cabinets made for pre-supersized people, fireplace mantels, cornices, cracked wood frame windows, those crazy beautiful swirling flowers in plaster in the foyer, encaustic tile, light fixtures from any decades but the past four, tenement linoleum, etc., my life would be complete. I make pacts with the God I don’t believe in that I will never want another thing.

I didn’t actually get to enter the “diamond in the rough.” I stared at the pictures on the Corcoran Web site (“six original mantels...original hall sinks”) and peeked in the windows. I didn’t get inside the house because by the time I found out it was for sale, it had already received multiple offers. The real-estate agent claimed he couldn’t show it again because the seller didn’t want to deal with any more people. Best and final was tomorrow at 3:30 P.M. He expected it to go well above asking.

I know someone friendly with the lady who had lived in the house for 30 years. She mentioned it to me casually, as only those not eaten alive with desire for a decaying wreck—who wisely bought their four-story brownstones in 1996 and now have fantasies about sprawling nine-room, all-new-construction, one-level condos—can. “The house across the street is for sale, and guess who’s looking at it? Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. Isn’t that weird? Oh, actually Miranda, you would love this house, it’s so you.” The woman who lived there, she said, had totally preserved it.

Thus began a heart-palpitating day of attempting to gain access to the house. My friend even went across the street to try and convince the occupant to let me in. The fact that my husband and I couldn’t really afford such a purchase had nothing to do with anything at this point. Panic coursed through my veins: “The last old-lady house in the North Slope, the last four-story for under $2 million, get it, get it, get it, I will save it, I will love it so much, the money will come, I will rent it all and sleep in one of the clawfoot tubs....”

The owner was intransigent, claiming exhaustion. I now see there was a multi-person conspiracy going on. The agent wanted to sell to movie stars. My friend wanted movie stars to buy it (her real-estate values). Even the innocent, tired senior wanted to sell to movie stars. “Best and final.” As if! Oops, did we forget to clarify that is was “best and final from the most glamorous bidders?”

I stared at the pictures longingly until Corcoran took them off the site, at which point I tried to forget about it.

But hearing that it was Maggie and Peter who would likely buy it felt like a punch in the gut. It seemed somehow more relentlessly unfair. “They could buy a mansion right on the park, why did they have to take this?” I wailed to my husband on the phone. “Don’t you see what’s going to happen? They’ll tear it all out. They’ll do a gut reno.”

“But Maggie’s stylish,” he said (of course, defending the cute girl star).

“Peter will sway her. He’ll want a new kitchen, then bathrooms. They’re actors! Dumb actors. They’ll get Svengali’d by some Jula.” (My parents had once been hypnotized by a sinister interior decorator named Jula.) “They probably bought under-budget so they could afford to really make it ‘theirs.’”

My hysteria escalated. “With movie stars there, the prices will rise beyond comprehension,” I said. “The market will never flatten. There’ll be an invisible wall between the North and South”—where we unfortunately bought, on a street replete with new trees and vinyl siding (though I hasten to add that one of the Strokes does live on it).

On the long F-train ride home, I thought about the first job I applied for in New York, in 1998. A grande dame editor at Grove Press, part of a Southern media-baron family, offered me a job as her assistant for $20,000 a year. I told her I was worried about paying rent. She said—very “let them eat cake”—“But your husband will buy a place here.” In my mind I responded, “Are you out of your beautiful fucking mind, lady? Buy a place? He’s a lawyer, not a financier-scion. Apartments cost half a million dollars!”

I wish, wish, wish like everyone else, that I’d bought then, but what I really wish is that I could go back to that era. When movie stars lived on the parks (Central, Gramercy, Washington Square), not in crumbly, crummy Brooklyn. When old-lady houses were everywhere and it seemed like there was time, because developers and gut renovators weren’t lurking outside every chipped stoop. When you did get enormously wealthy (by 90 percent of the world’s standards) because you’d worked Manhattan hard, you knew you’d buy a place—cramped but with dentelle molding, not in the West Village, but maybe Kips Bay. Or you just didn’t think about it all the time. Before the vile New York Times real-estate section, or the viler Key, which I had to instantly throw in the bin, the transparent forum for condo ads was so psychically damaging.

I want to be joking when I say: “I’ll never be able to enjoy a Maggie Gyllenhaal movie again.”

"John had a suite of offices; I took the one closest to the hall," he said, explaining that it was his style to stay close to the newsroom. "At Money magazine, I had a desk on the news floor. I'm a hands-on editor. I prefer where I'm sitting."

According to a George source, when the senior staff of George magazine was called to a meeting with Hachette Filipacchi Magazines chief executive Jack Kliger midday on Nov. 29, the new editor, with his bushy mustache, was sprung on them. The reaction? "Oh my God, what's Frank Lalli doing sitting there?" one editor was overheard saying.

So what was Mr. Lalli doing there? "[Mr. Kliger] wanted a magazine maker. That's what I am."

Mr. Lalli, 57, has a long history as a "magazine maker." He ran Money magazine from 1989 through 1997, and had worked for the New York Daily News , House & Home , Forbes and New West –the latter under Clay Felker, a pioneer of reader-oriented service journalism. It was while working for Mr. Felker 23 years ago that he met an ad salesman for The Village Voice named Jack Kliger. He said they'd been friends ever since.

"I first started talking to Jack in the summer," Mr. Lalli said. That was shortly after Mr. Kliger took over for David Pecker, but before Kennedy died. By then, Mr. Kliger had pretty much decided to end Hachette's relationship with George. That was fine with Kennedy, who had already begun trying to find new investors, according to a publishing executive familiar with Kennedy's plans at the time.

Mr. Lalli said his conversations with Mr. Kliger had nothing to do with George. "I was talking about another start-up and some other roles I might be able to play at Hachette," he said.

Mr. Kennedy was killed in a plane crash on July 16. Soon after, Hachette decided to keep the magazine alive, but wanted to buy the shares Kennedy had controlled from his heirs. Meanwhile, they were looking for a new editor.

Just after Labor Day, Mr. Kliger and Hachette editorial director Jean-Louis Ginibre met with Newsweek 's Jonathan Alter. Mr. Alter wrote an edit plan and they talked salary, but by October Mr. Alter had decided to stay put. The whole thing got messy when Mr. Alter told the press he'd been offered the job and Hachette denied it. Hachette became gun-shy about who they talked to next. They wanted someone who wanted the job, not someone they'd woo and who might reject them at the last minute, said a source familiar with Mr. Kliger's thinking. They didn't want another Alter-esque blow-up, especially while they were still negotiating to buy the magazine from the Kennedy family.

The deal went through on Oct. 27, while the search for an editor continued. Candidates were impressed with Hachette's commitment to producing the magazine for at least two more years. Nonetheless, Newsweek international editions editor Michael Elliott also turned them down.

Re-enter Mr. Lalli. "After Jack and Hachette bought the magazine from the Kennedys, Jack called me up and said, 'I have another idea for you,'" said Mr. Lalli. Mr. Lalli said he hadn't read the magazine particularly closely, but he took home a stack over a weekend. "I got back to Jack and said, I'm interested in this … I find myself, my background and outlook on life compatible with what John Kennedy was trying to do: to help people understand who the public figures are in this country who have real political clout, and how are they using it to either serve the public or disserve it."

Sounding very much like his mentor, Mr. Felker, he said, "If you want to get this magazine down to two words, what we're doing is 'power people.'"

At Money, Mr. Lalli took a nearly crusading attitude toward his job and his readers, even testifying before Congress on issues affecting their financial well-being. His editorials had titles like, "Congress aims at lawyers and ends up shooting small investors in the back" and "What we ought to remember about the Oklahoma bombing is the heroism, not the terrorism." He said he persuaded President Clinton to veto a securities law. "I wrote five editorials that changed public policy," he said. He expects to do the same at George .

His fellow editors at Time Inc. said, however, it was that earnest spirit that ultimately doomed him in 1994, with the arrival of Norman Pearlstine. Mr. Pearlstine was looking for a magazine with an edge, and that's not what Mr. Lalli was about. He had been gunning for Mr. Lalli's Money for years and, in fact, is said to have started Smart Money while he was at The Wall Street Journal to exploit what he saw as its failings.

In 1997, Mr. Pearlstine booted him upstairs in Time Inc., after writing an editorial in Money praising him for his defense of the American consumer. Mr. Lalli stuck around until the next year. One theory has it Mr. Pearlstine didn't want the embarrassment of firing Mr. Lalli while he was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors, particularly as Mr. Lalli was doing earnest, do-good things like fighting Chrysler's attempt to get pre-approval of articles in magazines in which it advertised.

At Money, Mr. Lalli adopted the motto "Our Readers Above All," and had it mounted in brass near the office's entrance. So expect George's can-do American spirit to continue, unfettered by irony.

Will Hachette, which has had a reputation for mingling church and state, leave Mr. Lalli and his Dudley Do-Right tendencies alone? Mr. Lalli said he's not worried. "That was one regime and this is another regime," he said. "We won't have problems in that area."

The New York Post crew bid farewell to Jeane MacIntosh, Richard Johnson's No. 2 reporter at Page Six, on Nov. 29 at Langan's on West 47th Street. Ms. MacIntosh is moving to Chicago to be with her fiancée and serve as the paper's Midwest correspondent. Earlier that day, Mr. Johnson hired her replacement, Paula Froelich, who'll be coming from Dow Jones Newswires. Previous gig: Derivatives Week .

The main advantage to covering gossip as opposed to derivatives? "I'm so psyched," said Ms. Froelich, "because I'll know who the blind items are. Oh, my God, it's fabulous."

Editors Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn have hired Variety news editor Chris Petrikin for their planned Insidedope.com Web site. Mr. Petrikin rose quickly at Variety : He started as editor Peter Bart's assistant five years ago and ended up covering the movie studios. He joins Craig Marks, who will oversee music industry coverage, and Lorne Manly, who oversees media coverage. Asked about the latest hire, Mr. Hirschorn continued acting as if he's involved in some top-secret mission, saying, "I just can't comment in any fashion."

For the last few months, Out president and editorial director Henry Scott has been trying to organize a "management buyout" of the troubled lesbian and gay monthly. According to a publisher he approached, the deal was structured so that a new investor would be found and he would remain in charge. Such a deal would bail out Robert Hardman, Out Publishing Inc.'s chairman, owner and chief benefactor over the years.

But that plan did not work out, and now Mr. Scott has left the magazine.

Mr. Scott, who had previously worked as a marketing executive for The New York Times and as an editor at The Hartford Courant , became president at Out after the departure of its founder, Michael Goff, in 1996. By most accounts, he cut costs and raised ad revenue. In January 1998, he oversaw a radical shift in the magazine's editorial direction. He threw out editor Sarah Pettit and replaced her with a flashy British fellow, James Collard. Mr. Collard lasted about a year, then left mysteriously. Next, Mr. Scott himself took over as editorial director.

Circulation fell to 115,000 by the most recent audit in June 30, 1999, down from a high of 134,700 in 1997, the final year of Ms. Pettit's tenure. Out 's competitor, The Advocate , has 83,000 paying readers.

One publisher the magazine approached about buying Out said the magazine was about $5 million in debt. That fact, combined with the proposed deal's stipulation that Mr. Scott would remain in charge, blocked the deal.

When reached at home, Mr. Scott refused to comment. But in an e-mail sent out to friends and business acquaintances, he wrote of his Out days: "It was a tenure marked by more than its fair share of problems and controversies, the latter of which I admit to sometimes creating and always reveling in." He also said he's writing a book and will be consulting at Out and Nest , an interior decorating magazine.

Steve Pippin, the magazine's executive vice president and general manager, will now serve as Out 's president. Executive editor Tom Beer will oversee the editorial side for the time being.

Out spokesman Alberto Rojas said "several parties" are looking at the magazine. "We'll hopefully close a deal in the new year," he said. He refused to comment on the magazine's debt or who the suitors are.