Derick Daniels, a newspaper and magazine executive who helped turn around financially troubled Playboy Enterprises in the late 1970s, has died.
Mr. Daniels, 76, died of cancer Feb. 5 in Miami.
Experienced in newspaper management, he was brought into Playboy in 1976 as president and chief operating officer by company founder Hugh Hefner to correct problems made during rapid overexpansion.
“Playboy had simply outgrown its management and had to be brought from the horse-and-buggy era to the jet age,” Mr. Daniels told Business Week in 1980.
While deferring to Hefner in presenting the public face of the company, then based in Chicago, Mr. Daniels set about pruning the inflated corporate staff and selling off unprofitable hotels, recording and movie theater operations, and other properties. He also created an internal auditing department, expanded publishing operations, added casinos in Atlanta and London and built up the core products of Playboy magazine and key clubs.
Another assignment, Mr. Daniels said, was to train Hefner’s daughter Christie to replace him as president, which she did in 1982.
He later dabbled in small magazines, senior care centers, a restaurant and a costume jewelry company.
Born in Washington, D.C., Mr. Daniels was the scion of a North Carolina publishing family that owned the Raleigh News & Observer and other newspapers. After graduation from the University of North Carolina, he worked at several newspapers as a reporter before joining The Miami Herald in 1955, where he rose to city editor.
He took the same post at the Detroit Free Press in 1961 and six years later was named vice president and executive editor. In 1973 he became vice president of Knight Newspapers Inc. (later Knight-Ridder).
Daniels is survived by his wife, Lee, two sons and two stepsons.
