Richard Beckman: Last of the Old-Style Media Moguls?

For decades the high-living, hard-charging Beckman turned Condé Nast's glossy titles into cash cows. But critics doubt he can do the same for a stable of trade publications such as The Hollywood Reporter

By Andrew Goldman

Marco Grob

Richard Beckman says he's not particularly fond of Mad Dog, a nickname he earned as a sales executive at Condé Nast, the magazine publisher where he spent 24 years. He finds it demeaning, and says it is belied by the fact that he is actually shy and quiet. In several meetings, he does display an almost theatrical delicacy in the way he speaks and gestures, rotating his wrists in the florid manner of a magician. But there is a note of canine aggression in his voice when he calls from Aspen on Friday, Mar. 18. He is supposed to be on vacation, skiing with his family, but instead he's spent the day in crisis mode, his ear attached to his cell phone talking to his editors, magazine publishers, and his company's publicist. The New York Post has just printed a story declaring that investors in Beckman's one-year-old company, Prometheus Global Media, which owns The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, Billboard, and other trade magazines, are scrambling to get out of their investment. For a man trying to reinvent an Old Media business, the last thing you want to read is that when your company forked over $70 million for eight publications in 2009, it "overpaid"—even when it's coming from an unnamed source in a newspaper that isn't necessarily known for its accuracy. Since Beckman and the investment partners issued firm public denials to the Post, who could the source possibly be? "I have no idea," he says, "but I'd love to wring their neck if I could find out."

The English-born Beckman is an archetype from a period that may never return, if it ever really existed: a salesman who made money fall from the sky during glossy magazines' heyday, accustomed to living high and celebrating his rough edges, if not his nickname. For decades he was among those responsible for turning magazines such as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue into cash machines for Condé Nast, which publishes those titles and a long list of others. Now, Beckman has moved on from that magazine empire's glamorous Times Square cocoon of Town Cars and expense accounts and spends his days in far more modest offices downtown. (After suffering through a brutal ad recession, Condé Nast has moved on, too.) With Prometheus, Beckman is trying to repeat his success within the least glamorous sector of publishing—trade magazines—at a time when print has practically been given up for dead in some quarters. Not only is $70 million of other people's money at stake; so, it seems, is Beckman's reputation and the sense that he can be a successful visionary on his own.

"I really want to make a mark, but don't feel I have to the degree that I'd like to," he says. "I can look at myself and know I'm a good person, but there are things I'd like to achieve that I haven't yet." He has been bruised by stories like one particularly nasty column that ran in The New York Observer last year, which posited that he was an "irrelevant" figure at Condé Nast whose departure prompted "parties in the hallways," and by more recent blog posts suggesting his new venture is hemorrhaging money. For someone who's been called a bully, Beckman has a surprisingly fragile ego. "I couldn't bring myself to read it," he says of the Observer piece. "I was so upset."

"I'm a fierce competitor," he continues. "I can tell you, no matter how many caustic articles that they write about me or my team or these businesses, that we will prevail and it will be at their expense."


"B-to-I," Beckman says with a twinkle-eyed smile. "I should have trademarked that."

Beckman is in full salesman mode. Rather than running a business that primarily services consumers, such as Vanity Fair, or a media business that services another business, such as Variety, Beckman claims he's invented a new category of audience. "Business-to-influencer means your product is talking to not just the industry but also to that top-of-the-pyramid consumer who follows those industries," he says. It's a pitch he's promoting in a highly produced video for potential advertisers, featuring actors and movie producers whose names I must promise not to disclose, who wax on about the massive cultural influence of Hollywood and how The Hollywood Reporter is synonymous with that influence.