With Acquisitions of Mail.com, Fan.com, Deadline.com & Others, the 30-Year-Old Son of Auto Racing Legend Roger Penske is Building an Internet Media Empire

Reader John Picchietti sent me a link to a very interesting story that was published in the Los Angeles Times Thanksgiving Day. The article by Ben Fritz detailed how 30-year-old Jay Penske, the son of auto racing legend Roger Penske, has been quietly building an Internet media empire over the past five years with some very nice generic domains providing the foundation for his rapidly growing enterprise. 

Just three years after he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's famous Wharton Business School, Penske made his first big move by acquiring Mail.com to be the cornerstone of his Santa Monica, California based Mail.com Media Corp.  In the new media world in which online publications are are steadily taking market share away from traditional print outlets, Penske decided to go after the celebrity news and lifestyle segment first with a series of online magazines.

With $35 million in funding, led by private equity firm Quadrangle Group, Penske bought old school magazines Movieline and Hollywood Life and converted them from print to the web. Penske also added to his stable this past summer by spending several million dollars to acquire Nikki Finke's popular showbiz blog Deadline.com.

Jay Penske
CEO, Mail.com Media Corp.

Penske is spending big on talent as well as publications. He hired star magazine editor Bonnie Fuller to run the new HollywoodLife.com website that launched last week. Fuller has an impressive resume after serving as the editor of Star, Us Weekly, Marie Claire and Glamour magazines, among others. Fuller is overseeing a staff of 11 professional writers at HollywoodLife.com. They come from places like CNN, the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Fuller and Penske both believe that compelling original content will be the key to their success. 

Penske told the Times, "There's such an abundance of reheated content on the Web, and we think original content is what people want and advertisers are looking for. I look at this as building an all-star team of editorial talent in each of our categories." 

Many of my friends from traditional media fret that professional journalists will soon become a thing of the past and the huge job losses in traditional media would appear to back them up. However it has always been my belief that quality will always be in demand and once online ad revenues reach a tipping point there will be plenty of opportunities for professional writers to make a good living online. 

I believe we are currently just going through a transitional period from old media to new that is causing temporary dislocations as the old platforms contract even faster than most anticipated. They are shrinking so quickly that their online successors haven't had time to reach maturity and absorb all of the qualified refugees from traditional media yet. However, I have no doubt that the day is coming when the new order will be able to do that and I am rooting for people like Penske who are placing their bets on exactly that kind of outcome.