From the NY Post
Wink, a new lifestyle magazine aimed at affluent women in their 30s and early 40s, is now being developed by Gruner + Jahr USA, The Post has learned.
It's the second major project to come to light in recent weeks inside G + J, the same publisher that only months ago was reeling from the meltdown of Rosie - its short-lived partnership with comedian Rosie O'Donnell that resulted in the shutdown of the magazine and acrimonious lawsuits.

Only several weeks ago, G + J dropped a 500,000-piece direct mail test for Flash, a new potential magazine launch for women in their 20s. The Wink project, which has been quietly under development for months by former Rosie editor-in-chief Susan Toepfer, just got clearance on the name in the past week and is expected to do a direct mail drop in the next few weeks.

A prototype of Wink, which has been shown to ad agencies, features actress Catherine Zeta Jones on the cover, according to Madison Avenue sources.

The significant thing about the magazine is that it is on target at all. G + J USA CEO Daniel Brewster was seen as presiding over a public relations disaster because of his leading role in converting the 125-year-old McCall's into Rosie. The collapse of the magazine when O'Donnell pulled out earned him a dart from BusinessWeek magazine as one of the "Worst Managers of the Year" in American business in 2002. Given the drubbing that business leaders just took in America, from Jack Welch's extramarital hijinks to Martha Stewart's insider trading scandals, and Enron, that was seen as quite a comeuppnace.

But sources at Bertelsmann, the tightfisted German media giant that controls Gruner + Jahr USA, said that Brewster had not been as badly damaged in the fatherland as he was on the home front by the bitter turn of events. "They're not a public company and the Germans are used to much worse treatment by the German press," said one Bertelsmann insider.

In fact, despite the Rosie travails that played out across the last six months of the magazine's existence, the title still attracted 1,015 ad pages - up a whopping 63 percent from a year earlier.

In a year-end memo to staffers, Brewster recently said that the company's overall ad pages were up 12.7 percent, rising to 8,289 from 7,354 a year ago. It comes despite the Rosie shutdown and disastrous years at Fast Company and Inc.

Gains at titles such as Fitness, Child and YM, Parents helped offset that. And G + J's gains came in a year in which the industry overall sank another 3.19 percent in total pages, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Most industry observers think it unlikely that the German executives who most ultimately greenlight all launches would OK Wink and Flash simultaneously. One insider at G + J said, "It's not necessarily a bakeoff." The mags are aimed at different age groups and ultimately could be seen as links leading to the company's largest circ title, Family Circle, with a media readership age in the early 40s.