I’d hoped to see Christie Hefner in New York Tuesday, where she was supposed to lead Playboy’s presentation at the UBS Global Media and Communications conference. Instead, she was in Chicago when we spoke by phone a day after her surprising announcement that, after two decades heading the family business,…

Playboy’s saving grace is the power and iconography of its brand. So said CEO Christie Hefner during the company’s Q3 earnings call, in which she acknowledged that Playboy (NYSE: PLA) is facing challenges on all fronts—from dwindling print circulation and ad revenue, to the push to revamp its digital property,…

So the big move from Playboy Enterprises (NYSE: PLA) has come, not in the form of a transformative deal as I have been exhorting them to do, but as a restructuring. It is closing down its DVD division, and is on a quest to reduce its cost structure by approximately…

Despite CEO Christie Hefner’s advice to newspapers struggling with the transition from traditional to digital last week, judging by Playboy’s (NYSE: PLA) Q2 results, the company still doesn’t seem to have found a model for others to emulate. The Chicago-based publisher reported a Q2 net loss of $2.1 million ($0.06…

If you are snickering here, wait…Playboy (NYSE: PLA) CEO Christie Hefner is “blogging” for Portfolio.com about the future of newspapers and gives her deep-thought opinion on what they should be focusing on. She talks about a code worth cracking: “rather than seemingly focusing on cost-cutting their way out of their…

It’s early on day two of the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference, but a theme is starting to emerge, particularly among the global media companies: they all have great brands on the cusp of global, multi-platform growth, with digital picking up where established media are tailing off—or so they…