New York -- Conde Nast Entertainment, which has been
gestating for a year and a half under the helm of Dawn Ostroff, will be adding
programming based on Vogue and Wired, the division announced at its
NewFront presentation on Wednesday.
The titles will join Glamour
and GQ, which were the first tolaunch under CNE in March,
with channels for Vanity Fair, Teen Vogue,
Epicurious and Style.com launching later this year.
Vogue's slate will
debut on May 8 and include series like Vogue
Weddings; The Fund, about the
competition for the prestigious CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund endowment; and cooking
show Elettra's Goodness. Wired will launch a week later on May 15
and with series like Game Life, which
interviews video game creators; and Codefellas,
a scripted animated show set in the world of the NSA.
Glamour and GQ will also add six new series between
them: Glamour Video Gift of the Week,
which highlights hot men; makeover competition Style to Kill; its first scripted show Single Life; GQ's new series are Casualties of the Gridiron, a documentary about players coping with
their post-NFL lives; GQ How To; and The GQ Trend Report.
Ostroff, who watched the migration of young viewers to the
Web as the former head of The CW, said she saw several ways CNE's video could
end up on television, including deals with over-the-top providers and
additional long-form content that could be programmed on traditional networks
(The company on Tuesday hired Gina Marcheschi to be VP of television scripted
series).
Conde Nast will be leveraging its 200 million global
consumers to drive viewership for the channels, and in turn hoping viewership
boosts readership, as video content won't be restricted to subscribers. On
Wednesday, it announced strategic syndication partnerships with Yahoo, AOL,
Twitter, Dailymotion and Grab Media to further extend its reach.
Ostroff opened her remarks Wednesday by saying she was
probably the only executive to have hosted both an upfront and a newfront, and
it was evident in CNE's tight presentation -- the event at 583 Park Avenue on
the Upper East Side came in under 40 minutes, compared to the two-hour runtime
of other newfronts this week.
