Inside Rosie and AOL Time Warner
By Peter Carlson Washington Post Staff Writer

Greed! Egomania! Back-stabbing! Temper tantrums! Vicious office politics! Ah, I love stories about the magazine business.

This month, two prominent magazines have published dishy articles about nefarious doings at other prominent magazines: Vanity Fair covers the absurd rise and pathetic fall of Rosie, while GQ covers the reign of terror unleashed by a despotic honcho at the magazines published by the mega-conglomerate now known as AOL Time Warner.

So, let me issue a warning: This is a magazine review about two magazine stories about magazines. If that's too ridiculously meta for you, quit reading now. My only defense is that these stories help explain why so many of America's big corporate publishers put out such lame mags.

Let's start with Judith Newman's Vanity Fair piece about Rosie O'Donnell and her eponymous magazine, which has just published its final issue and laid off 120 staffers amid a flurry of name-calling and a $100 million lawsuit against O'Donnell by Gruner & Jahr, the corporate giant that published Rosie.

Newman begins with a delicious -- or maybe not so delicious -- anecdote about O'Donnell dining in a New York restaurant and ranting so vociferously against G&J that she starts spitting at Newman. Yuck!

In Newman's portrayal, O'Donnell sounds like the magazine editor from Hell. She knew zip about magazines. She came to the office so seldom that she felt compelled to hire her girlfriend's stepsister to serve in her absence as "interpreter of Rosie's vision." And when she did show up, she berated underlings so viciously that one staffer asked G&J management to provide a security guard to protect her from O'Donnell.

Here's how the cuddly TV host whom Newsweek dubbed the "Queen of Nice" explained her nasty temper to Newman: "Of course I'm angry. Rage is the foundation of comedy."

But the failure of Rosie the magazine goes far beyond the myriad personal failings of Rosie the human. The mag was conceived in cynicism and born in naked greed.

" 'Rosie' was not O'Donnell's idea," Newman writes in a paragraph that sums up the whole sorry affair. "It was dreamed up by one of her lawyers, Philip K. Howard, and her business manager, Dan Crimmins, who also happens to be her brother-in-law."

In other words, the mag was created purely for money by people with no real interest in magazines. These greedheads made the rounds of Manhattan's media conglomerates, pitching Rosie as the successor to Martha and Oprah in the new category of "celebrity-as-brand."

Most of these magazine barons were smart enough to reject this cockamamie proposal. But Dan Brewster took the bait.

Brewster is the CEO of Gruner & Jahr, which is a division of Bertelsmann, the huge German multinational, multimedia conglomerate. G&J publishes Parents, Family Circle and YM and is, in Newman's apt description, "penny-pinching, profitable and utterly vanilla."

Brewster, a senator's son who made his name running American Express Publishing's stable of boring luxury magazines, loved the Rosie idea. "He said it would be instant money," a former G&J publisher told Newman. "They thought they would mint money."

It didn't turn out that way. The magazine was awful, and after some initial success it began to fade.

But the real comedy came last spring, when the Queen of Nice left her TV show, came out as what Newman describes as a "left-wing lesbian" and tried to move the mag in that direction. That led to battles with Brewster, which led to O'Donnell's resignation.

In the end, the best description of Rosie comes in an e-mail written by O'Donnell and quoted by Newman: "It lacks definition. It does not take risks. There is not enough controversary [sic] . . . "

Which is, come to think of it, a pretty good description of most of the 130 magazines published by AOL Time Warner, whose "editorial director" John Huey is eviscerated in a GQ profile by Maximillian Potter.

As Potter tells the wretched tale, Huey climbed the corporate ladder through a skillful combination of bum-kissing and back-stabbing. Since he arrived at the top of the magazine division in July 2001, he has presided over an "editorial bloodbath," ousting editors at Sports Illustrated, Money, Fortune, People and Entertainment Weekly and tormenting other editors in various sadistic ways.

If Huey's Stalinesque purges were undertaken to improve the magazines, they have thus far failed. But we don't know what Huey intended because he refused to talk to Potter. And after asking Potter to submit questions by e-mail, he refused to answer most of them.

Despite that problem, Potter's piece has two wonderful moments.

The first comes when Huey moves to Bronxville, a New York suburb populated by many media honchos. There, Huey's third wife got into a spat with the wife of another AOL Time Warner editor over child-rearing techniques. When this brouhaha escalated into a "neighborhood cold war," Huey packed up the family and moved to an island in South Carolina. From there, he commutes to Manhattan every week by private plane, at a cost to the corporation of about $13,000 per round trip.

Take that, AOL Time Warner shareholders!

The second wonderful moment comes when Huey appears on the Charlie Rose TV show and Rose asks him how he was affected by the tragedy of his second wife's death from cancer. Huey clears his throat with a few quick cliches and then says: "I don't get too worked up about firing people. . . . As I always say to myself when I'm doing it, I'm not killing anybody here."

There you have the new corporate magazine honcho -- a man who comes away from his wife's death with a renewed fondness for firing his employees.

Perhaps other corporate magazine executives are not so crass -- or so honest. But they all share a quality that distinguishes them from an earlier generation of magazine publishers, men like Time's Henry Luce, Esquire's Arnold Gingrich, even Playboy's Hugh Hefner: This new breed exhibits no passion about bringing their own personal vision of truth and beauty to magazine readers. They are mere managers, empty suits with spreadsheet souls. That's why most of their magazines are so timid, so tepid, so insipid.