Brill Will Lead Primedia Unit

Steven Brill, who built and then sold Court TV in a cloud of controversy, has taken on his latest project: running a new division of Primedia that will include Cable World.

Brill will be chairman/CEO of Media Central and will continue in the same role at Brill Media Holdings, the owner of Brill’s Content and Contentville.com, Brill and Primedia chairman/CEO Tom Rogers announced last week.

Media Central will hold 49% equity in BMH, and BMH will take an undisclosed smaller stake in Media Central. No cash traded hands, the companies said.

Among the other properties included in Media Central are Kagan World Media, Folio Magazine, American Demographics, Circulation Management, Simba (an information services company) and MediaCentral.com.

Media Central hopes to exploit the expertise of its editorial staff and its scale

of resources across the properties. For example, Brill said, Brill’s Content "does stories all the time about the business of the various cable networks." Similarly, he added Kagan could provide "valuable data and research to Cable World."