Magazines. Penske Media Corp (PMC), of New York, publisher of ARTnews, is acquiring the 11-year-old online service Art Market Monitor, from its founding editor Marion Maneker. Penske, which acquired ARTnews and Art in in 2018, has a growing portfolio including: Variety, WWD, Robb Report, Rolling Stone, Deadline, and Indiewire. It also has a digital JV with ZEEtv, one of India’s largest media groups.
Owner Jay Penske also operates Dragon Racing, which participates in Formula-E racing. Previously, he was the co-founder of Firefly Mobile Inc, and owns an antiquarian bookstore in Los Angeles. He has variously won plaudits as the “best dressed man” and “one of the 25 most powerful people in LA”. But some of the glamour has been erased by an investment from Saudi Arabian interests which had seemed to indicate either an impending IPO or a transformational deal.
This week, Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap said: “For months I’ve been mystified by Jay Penske’s silence over the $200m investment stake his company, Penske Media Corporation, took from a Saudi government-backed company in February 2018. Since the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post opinion writer and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, Saudi Arabia has become persona non grata in the world of media and entertainment if not in our government. US intelligence reports confirm that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself ordered Khashoggi killed. Endeavor, the parent company of talent agency WME and sports conglomerate IMG, found its own $400m investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund untenable. The Hollywood company returned the investment in March of this year.” www.thewrap.com
