Pamela Wasserstein, 38, a former corporate lawyer whose father paid $55 million for New York magazine in 2004, will become chief executive of its parent company on Monday. Credit Cole Wilson for The New York Times
Adam Moss, the editor in chief of New York magazine, was having dinner at Sant Ambroeus, an upscale restaurant in the West Village, with Pamela Wasserstein and her two brothers when she mentioned that she was ready for a career change.
It was the summer of 2014, the magazine had just gone from weekly to biweekly, and Mr. Moss recalled thinking at the time that it made sense to have the Wasserstein heirs, whose family trust owns the publication, more involved with the day-to-day decision-making.
The next day, Mr. Moss called Ms. Wasserstein, then working for the company behind the Tribeca Film Festival, and floated an idea: She should run the magazine.
Nearly two years later, that plan is finally coming to fruition. On Monday, Ms. Wasserstein, 38, will become chief executive of New York Media, the magazine’s parent company, giving the family more direct control of the publication and making it something of a New York media dynasty.
The move can be traced to 2004, when Ms. Wasserstein’s father, Bruce Wasserstein, bought New York magazine for $55 million. After Mr. Wasserstein, an investment banker who helped popularize the hostile takeover, died unexpectedly in 2009 at 61, there was a short period of uncertainty about the publication’s future. The economy had soured and some speculated that the family might sell.
Instead, Mr. Wasserstein’s children held on, and proved to be devoted owners. Ms. Wasserstein and her two brothers, Scoop and Ben, a former editor at the magazine, had monthly meetings with the management team and were part of discussions about the publication’s strategy. And in November 2014, a few months after that phone call with Mr. Moss, Ms. Wasserstein joined the magazine full time as co-chairwoman and head of strategy. (Scoop Wasserstein is a film development executive and Ben now works for a production company based at HBO.)
“It’s all family, every aspect of this place,” Mr. Moss, who has edited New York since 2004, said in an interview last week at the magazine’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. About Ms. Wasserstein, he added, “She’s really been kind of one of us for a long time.”
Ms. Wasserstein, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former corporate lawyer who previously led corporate development for Tribeca Enterprises, is taking the helm of a publication for the first time, and many would not envy her position. Magazines in particular have struggled to offset decreasing print advertising revenue and falling circulation.
Newsweek was sold for $1 in 2010 and Time Inc., whose publications include Time and People, was spun off from Time Warner in 2014 and saddled with debt. Popular Science said recently that it would come out bimonthly instead of monthly.
New York magazine, with a circulation of about 400,000, was down 12 percent in ad pages last year compared with the previous year. But the publication has several things in its favor.
“On editorial grounds, they’ve been terrific since the Wassersteins have owned them,” said Nicholas Lemann, a professor and former dean at Columbia University’s journalism school and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. “When you find a benign owner like the Wassersteins, you’re happy if you like magazines.”
Digitally, the magazine has become something of a force. It has built up a collection of online brands, including Vulture, The Cut and Daily Intelligencer, and its sites now have roughly 16 million unique online visitors a month, up 19 percent in the last year, according to comScore.
Ms. Wasserstein said she expected digital sales, which grew 10 percent last year, to make up 60 percent of the magazine’s advertising revenue this year (digital ad revenues surpassed print ad revenues for the first time in 2015, partly because of the decision to go biweekly, she said). And Mr. Moss, a former editor of The New York Times Magazine, is widely considered one of the best in the business.
The magazine is privately owned, so it does not disclose financial information, but Ms. Wasserstein said it was “strongly positioned for growth.”
“We’re happy with our strategy,” she said, “but we’re amplifying.”
To that end, she outlined a plan for New York centered on increasing its online audience and its digital revenue. The magazine is focusing on pumping up video offerings and building out a new branded content studio that it hopes will bolster ad revenue.
And on Wednesday, the magazine will introduce a new technology and culture site called Select All, which was born out of Following, a pop-up blog that covered social media. Max Read, the former editor of Gawker, will lead Select All.
There is certainly no shortage of technology-focused sites, but Mr. Read said Select All would be different by approaching technology “from the culture side” and focusing on “the way we live our lives.”
Separately, the magazine is exploring a cable television deal and trying to build out its live events business. Lest the publication itself be forgotten, Ms. Wasserstein said she was still dedicated to the print product. “For us, it’s a key part of our identity,” she said.
If it seems like New York is trying a bit of everything, it is not alone in the industry.
“Any media company is a laboratory right now,” Mr. Moss said. “There is no established way to do anything.”
However the magazine manages to navigate out of the industry’s uncertainty, installing Ms. Wasserstein as its leader seems to indicate the family is willing to see it through. She will replace Anup Bagaria, a managing partner at the private equity firm Wasserstein & Company, who has been chief executive of New York Media since Bruce Wasserstein bought the magazine.
“We are committed, and we see a bright future for the company,” Ms. Wasserstein said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to take this on if this wasn’t a place that I felt we could build value and an opportunity that I was excited about and my family is excited about.”
But she added: “Could circumstances change someday? Of course.”