Bill Reilly, 70; built empire of magazines
- |
NEW YORK - Bill Reilly, a publishing and media executive and a founder and former chairman of
Under Mr. Reilly's leadership Primedia amassed a portfolio of more than 200 magazines, including American Baby, Fly Fisherman, Soap Opera Digest, National Hog Farmer, and Adhesives Age, as well as Seventeen, Modern Bride, Chicago, and New York,
He died of bone cancer and prostate cancer at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where he had been receiving hospice care, said David Adler, a friend and a former Primedia vice president of communications.
Mr. Reilly entered the publishing business in 1980, when he was named president of Macmillan Inc., a book publisher that owned the Katherine Gibbs schools and the Berlitz language schools, just five months after he joined the company as executive vice president.
He remained at the helm of Macmillan for a decade. In 1989, with the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Mr. Reilly founded K-III Communications, a media company he joined as chairman and chief executive in 1990. It became one of the country's largest publishing companies by buying niche magazines, going public in 1995, and changing its name to Primedia in 1997. Primedia sold the remainder of its magazines to the Source Interlink Cos. in 2007 and continues to publish free consumer guides.
As chief executive, Mr. Reilly became embroiled in a brouhaha in 1996, when the company fired Kurt Andersen, the editor of New York magazine, a K-III property since 1991, after expressions of displeasure at some of the magazine's articles on the part of Henry Kravis, a partner in the ownership group. Kravis and Reilly said at the time that Andersen had been fired because the magazine was not performing well financially, though circulation and advertising revenue had risen slightly under his editorship.
William Francis Reilly was born in Manhattan on June 8, 1938; He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned an MBA from Harvard. He served in the US Army from 1959 to 1961. Before joining Macmillan, he worked for W.R. Grace, a construction products and chemical company, as a financial analyst, and later was in charge of the company's textiles, sporting goods, and home products divisions.
Reilly's marriage, to Ellen Chapman, ended in divorce. He leaves a sister, Elizabeth Smith of New Rochelle, N.Y.; a son, Anthony of Manhattan; a daughter, Jane Reilly Mount of Manhattan; and four grandchildren.
Since leaving Primedia in 1999, Mr. Reilly founded and was the chairman of two other media companies, Aurelian Communications and Summit Business Media.
