American Media, which had something of a confusing 2009—withstanding a near brush with bankruptcy while publishing a Pulitzer-contending National Enquirer series of exposés on the philandering would-be veep John Edwards—is looking for a real estate broker.

"We're in the super, super, super-preliminary phases," American Media Inc. spokeswoman Samantha Trenk told The Commercial Observer. "We haven't yet selected an architecture firm or a broker."

Ms. Trenk wouldn't reveal precisely how much space the media giant, which also owns Men's Fitness, Star, Shape and Country Weekly, is hunting for. But she did say that the firm's lease at One Park Avenue, owned by Murray Hill Properties, expires next year. Right now, the firm has space on two floors, totaling nearly 25,000 square feet, according to real estate database CoStar.

Media Wire Daily, an industry blog, first reported the incipient office hunt late last week, posting a March 24 staff memo from American Media chairman and CEO David Pecker. It reads, in part: "[W]e are in the process of looking at other locations and developing a space plan. We will need your input as we will be looking to upgrade from the current space and will provide you all with the most functional work environment possible."

drubinstein@observer.com

The 920,000-square-foot building will sell for about $585 a foot. That trumps the $526 a foot that 2 Park Avenue, directly across the street, got two months ago when L & L Holding Company bought it for $450 million.

One Park Avenue

One Park Avenue's tenants include American Media--Star, The National Enquirer--and Equinox, which has office space in the building and a brand-new gym coming soon.

The building will be the largest in Murray Hill's portfolio, which includes four Manhattan buildings, including 417 Fifth Avenue and the Brill Building, according to the firm's Web site. Representatives from Murray Hill and SL Green declined to comment. CB Richard Ellis' Darcy Stacom and Bill Shanahan--who have had a busy week--represented SL Green. They were not available for comment.

- John Koblin

AMI's offices took the storm head on. David Perel, an AMI executive vice president who oversees owner David Pecker's Boca publications, said the roof and back porch were ripped off his house by the Category Three storm. Perel and his family took refuge with neighbors, and by the second day of the storm, he was back at AMI's offices directing the response and talking to Pecker by cell phone. Perel said by that morning all 300 AMI staffers had been accounted for.

"Following the hurricane, the most important thing was making sure all our Boca employees were safe," Pecker said in an e-mail statement.

Wilma hit early in the morning on Monday, Oct. 24. By Tuesday, AMI's backup generator failed and Perel transfered computers to an auxiliary office in Del Ray so his staffers could continue to edit and report under electric power. By Wednesday, the Boca office's generators came back online and The National Examiner was able to close at 2:00 pm, beating deadline by two hours. The Weekly World News (aliens settle down in San Francisco), the Sun (dog finds way home after two years) and the Globe (proposed biography of Prince William tells sex secrets) all closed on time by October 28.

"It was a Herculean effort in a very tough time and I am very thankful for it," Pecker said by e-mail.

While AMI's office ran on backup power, gas and supplies were in short order. AMI's human resources vice president Daniel Rotstein procured gasoline in five gallon jugs to refuel staffers' cars. Staffers subsisted on pretzels, peanuts and canned tuna, Perel said.

"You're talking about a refugee situation here basically," Perel said. "Palm Beach county is a wreck."

But a semblance of civilization soon returned. By Wednesday, platters of roast beef, turkey and ham sandwiches were brought in. Mr. Perel added that even though many employees suffered damage to their homes, 99 percent of AMI's staffers didn't miss a day of work.

--Gabriel Sherman

Owing to an impasse over staff perks--including catered meals--Min's contract expired last week before a new one could be signed. Though the New York Post reported last month that the two sides had settled on a deal, Min is now a free agent.

So if your publication needs punchier cover lines, try meeting Min's price--and bringing some cold cuts. On July 4, Whole Foods delivered lunchtime sandwiches to Us staffers who were spending the nation's birthday at the office. The workers also got catered breakfast and dinner. According to a source familiar with the negotiations, Min wants make such holiday meals a permanent perk at the magazine. She also wants to fill three currently vacant staff positions and to allow staffers to expense cab rides home after 9 p.m.

This is Min's first contract negotiation since she moved atop the masthead in 2003, after Bonnie Fuller decamped to American Media. Circulation is up nearly 13 percent under Min, and revenue shot up by 59 percent last year.

Min declined to comment. Wenner Media, though declining to discuss terms of Min's contract, said they have offered their award-winning editor a generous package.

"More than anyone," said Kent Brownridge, Wenner's general manager, "we believe Janice is one of the best and most valuable editors in the world. And we very much want to keep her. We have done everything necessary to keep her interested in staying at Wenner for a really long time."

--Gabriel Sherman

After one young man grilled him about what it was like to work at the parent company of supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer , the Globe and the Star , he asked where the job was located. Mr. Pecker told him it was in Boca Raton, Fla., not New York City.

"I'll never forget this student asking, 'Isn't Boca Raton where you end your career and not begin your career?' At first I thought, 'This guy's a real wiseguy,'" Mr. Pecker said, relating the story in a borough-boy, he-said-she-said patois that fit perfectly with his Bronx accent, his voice both gravelly and nasal. "And as I'm driving back to my office, I thought: 'He's right.'"

But Mr. Pecker now has jobs open in New York City, and his career is far from over. With the help of a $3-million-a-year salary offer, he's managed to lure Bonnie Fuller, the former editor in chief of Us Weekly (named the 2002 editor of the year by Advertising Age ) to become his editorial director, leaving her boss, Jann Wenner, without ever signing her contract with him. Rumors-which Mr. Pecker said made him feel "very good"-also put the ousted GQ publisher Ron Galotti in his camp. (The rumors were false.) He's moving his most upmarket celebrity tabloid, the Star , to New York in the hopes of burnishing its image in the more upscale target market of People magazine and Us Weekly . He's angling for a public offering that would make the media corporation he's cobbled together from supermarket tabloids and small acquisitions into the only major magazine-only player in the publishing business. And in the process, Mr. Pecker-whom some acquaintances have likened to a modern P.T. Barnum-has made himself, and by extension his Boca Raton–based company, the unlikely topic of media lunchers at the Four Seasons and Michael's, an actual talking point for the city's cultural elite.

It feels good. "There was always an issue of respectability for me," Mr. Pecker told Off the Record at his Park Avenue office on a recent afternoon. His new digs are sparsely decorated. There's a picture of him with Hillary Clinton (in a pink suit) that sits on his window ledge, from before his tenure at American Media, where President Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was its stock-in-trade; nearby, is a framed cover of The National Enquirer featuring the doe eyes of murdered child-beauty-pageant star Jon Benet Ramsey.

"I didn't come up through the sales and marketing side; I didn't go to an Ivy League college," he said, reflecting further on his pedigree as an ambitious and scrappy New Yorker. "I grew up in New York. It was a lot different for me."

Mr. Pecker is no stranger to the New York magazine world. As head of the Hachette Filipacchi media group, he thriftily oversaw the operations of Elle and Premiere before leaving the company in 1999 to take over American Media.

But to many in New York's editorial and publishing elites, that exit was, in the words of the Columbia student, a "career-ender." Now he's back, and as a man with the resources to shake the foundations of the business.

In many ways, Mr. Pecker's first mission-to place the Star at the center of New York's glossy-magazine trade-reflects his ambitions for himself.

A lot of it, he will admit, is buzz. The proposition-that a supermarket tabloid would need to ratchet itself up only a level or two to meet magazines like Vanity Fair or the New York Post , with their cover stories about the Kennedys' marital strife, high-profile crimes and celebrity gossip-is still a titillating one in New York publishing circles.

That doesn't make it an easy sell. In Mr. Pecker's worldview, these tabloids, along with the Star , can exist side by side with a group of consumer magazines he hopes to grow. After acquiring Weider Publications' group of muscle and fitness magazines last year (and raising American Media's total debt to $1 billion), Mr. Pecker thinks he can use American Media's distribution system, which controls 70 percent of the supermarket "pockets" in the United States, to build brands like Men's Fitness and Natural Health as rivals to Men's Health and Real Simple . He plans relaunches of the magazines later this fall, though he admits the added newsstand presence will take 200,000 more pockets and may cost up to $4 million. In addition, he said, the company has been developing plans for a cable fitness channel. He calls this combination "mass and class."

Mr. Pecker has managed to sell this model as a distribution play. But how good is his distribution-system realm if the tabloids, with the best placement of any publication in the country, continue to lose circulation? And now he's chasing magazines that make their money from advertising, not circulation, with the idea that the same distribution system that's lost readership for his flagship publications will prop up and even propel revamped magazines against more established brands.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Mr. Pecker has spoken openly of his interest in acquiring Men's Health parent Rodale, in addition to individual titles like Premiere (owned by Hachette) and New York (owned by Primedia). While Mr. Pecker declined to speak on any specific targets, he said all of those were on American Media's radar, and that he is interested in more big acquisitions down the road, all with an eye toward an eventual I.P.O.

But no maneuver, and certainly not the hiring of gossip princess Victoria Gotti, could have bought the kind of boldface publicity that Ms. Fuller's entrance brought to American Media.

"Everyone's been waiting to see what's Bonnie's going to do with the tabloids," said Mr. Pecker. "It's almost like one of our tabloids' stories. It's become a story within itself."

"David's much smarter and more competent than people give him credit for," said Martin S. Walker, a New York–based magazine consultant.

And the buzz-seeking hasn't always served Mr. Pecker as well as it seems to right now, Mr. Walker said.

"His big problem is that he's never seen a reporter he didn't want to speak to or a story about his own company that he didn't want to be the primary source for," he said.

Ms. Fuller's first-and, some who know her have forecasted, only-project with American Media: the Star . The three-decade-old tabloid, founded by Rupert Murdoch, received little if any notice when Mr. Pecker announced it was moving its editorial operations to New York last spring, and even less attention when Mr. Pecker and Steve Coz, formerly the editorial director for the American Media tabloids, began looking for a new editor for the Star , which American Media will "test" as a glossy magazine in January.

American Media interviewed or approached an impressive assortment of media professionals in the past several months, including former New York Post editor in chief Xana Antunes, Us Weekly news director Michael Lewittes, People assistant managing editor Larry Hackett (whom Jann Wenner had offered the editorship of Rolling Stone in 2002) and Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward.

He was looking for someone who could recoup the losses he'd suffered to Ms.Fuller. There was only one thing to do: hire her.

"Three months ago, I announced I was going to move the Star to New York, and then … we were interviewing [prospective editors in chief] and nothing was really coming out of it. A friend of mine who was an executive in the media industry-I was complaining to him about not being able to find someone-he asked me who I thought my biggest competitor was," Mr. Pecker recalled. "And I said, 'Right now, I'm losing all my circulation to Bonnie Fuller.' I said, 'I read in the Post that she has a long-term contract,' and he said, 'Do believe everything you read?' And I said yes. And he said, 'No, you should give her a call.'"

After he approached Ms. Fuller (who, it turned out, never actually signed her three-year, seven-figure contract with Wenner), Mr. Pecker said, it took less than 10 days to come to terms.

With 30 slots to fill in New York for the revamped company, Mr. Pecker said he'd received only 40 or 50 résumés before Bonnie Fuller came on; since then, the number has tripled.

"So there's like a buzz now, with Bonnie coming in and the talent of the people coming in from glossy magazines and newspapers …. It's always been difficult to get people from these places, because once you got over the issue of working for a tabloid, it was always the issue of moving to Florida. So … I think New York makes a huge difference."

Speaking to Off the Record via telephone about her new job, Ms. Fuller called it a "most fabulous opportunity," and said Mr. Pecker is "very engaging to work for. He's very on top of everything going on. He's got both a great vision and an understanding for detail about the business. We have a terrific dialogue. It's open and very honest."

However, according to a source with knowledge of the situation, there have already been a series of "ferocious fights" between the two. Among the issues of contention, according to the source, have been Ms. Fuller's push to use outside headhunters to fill the Star 's masthead; Mr. Pecker's more economical approach would have relied upon the in-house, Boca Raton–based human-resources office.

Mr. Pecker said that American Media had employed an outside recruiting firm at Ms. Fuller's insistence, and that any hiring and firing on the editorial level would be left to Ms. Fuller without his interference.

Still, one can't help but see Ms. Fuller as a bit of a show pony in all of this. While, at Ms. Fuller's insistence, Mr. Pecker said the Star would stop paying for stories and sources, The Enquirer and the Globe will not.

And because Ms. Fuller's name's attached to American Media now, their brand of "journalism" becomes a reflection of her in turn. Indeed, when the Globe put a partially-disguised photo of Kobe Bryant's accuser on its cover recently, it was Ms. Fuller's name that was put in with the accompanying item in the New York Post .

That won't stop Mr. Pecker from running the Globe and The Enquirer the way he wants to.

" The Enquirer is the news gathering machine. From all the stories they broke, From O.J. Simpson to Clinton's Pardongate to the Jesse Jackson love-child story, those are the stories they've become known for and they've always paid for sources."

"The Globe readers are totally different" than the Star 's, Mr. Pecker explained. "They're the same people who read the British tabloids. Very hard. Very aggressive. The Globe is going to stay exactly the way it is. They're not going to change."

Sitting in his New York office, Mr. Pecker was trying to make sense of where he is today. Florida, it turns out, can be lonely.

"I live on the grounds of the Boca Raton Hotel, so I live in a townhouse. ... It's a very quiet, transient kind of community off-season. For example, I live on a street with 15 townhouses. I'm the only person there for five months [out of the year]. If I'm walking the dog, I don't see any kids. I'm the only person there. That's the best way to describe what it's like living in Florida. It's also very hot."

Still, for now at least, the majority of American Media's editorial offices will remain there. But there's no doubt what having Ms. Fuller driving her troops to dawn deadlines means for the company. Just think back a year and a half ago, when Ms. Fuller jumped from her status as magazine consultant back into the ranks of the fully employed. As hard as it is to remember, there actually was a time when every 26-year-old woman was not reading Us Weekly on the F train, when groups of people could not be seen sharing a single copy and fiendishly feeding off a caption about Calista Flockhart managing her baby's tantrum.

But making Us Weekly -which benefited from sharing the Wenner media tent with Rolling Stone and Men's Journal -cool is one thing. Turning the Star , shackled with the downscale image of the gap-toothed, harried supermarket shopper with a taste for celebrity foibles thumbing its pages at the checkout counter, is another.

One former American Media executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, scoffed at the Star 's upmarket aspirations.

"There's no evidence, in my mind, that you take something upscale partially and then have advertisers come running to it," the executive said. "People don't forget you have a tabloid company. They are what they are, and probably shouldn't change."

And the Star is entering a crowded field, one where In Touch and Us Weekly continue to give focus groups déjà vu and where People has introduced sassier takes, bullets and multiple-entry points to crush all comers.

"It's a difficult competitive set," Mr. Pecker acknowledged. "So what we're looking to do-and this is one of the things Bonnie and I talked about since the beginning-is making the Star friendlier …. What we're trying to do is differentiate the three tabloids. The Star 's going to be much softer, more packed with photos, friendlier and have relationships will all the major P.R. executives-which, before, the tabloids didn't have."

Indeed, the celebrity magazines depend on that particular kind of "respectability," one that's measured in callbacks from the powerful publicists who run so much of New York and Los Angeles these days.

Chalk it up to Mr. Pecker's enthusiasm for the genre in which he's become America's biggest player.

"Tabloids are an institution in the United States," he said. "The exposure of the hypocrisy of the rich and famous-these are all the kinds of things that people read, and it's an hour of entertainment for $2. And I think that'll always be there. For stuff like the Kobe Bryant story or the Laci Peterson true story, people buy the tabloids because they feel-honestly, other than the entertainment-they feel like they're not going to read a press release from a P.R. company."

Born in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, the son of a Jewish bricklayer who worked with Italians from the other side of Arthur Avenue (and spoke Italian fluently), Mr. Pecker began as far from the boardrooms of New York's most powerful media conglomerates as one could be in New York. Like many Bronx families, his family moved to the middle-class Westchester enclave of New Rochelle when he was a boy. (His accent remains.) He attended the public schools in New Rochelle. At the age of 16, his father died. His mother saw him graduate from high school and study finance at Pace University, after which Mr. Pecker spent his early career as an auditor for Price Waterhouse.

"I was in the publishing business, but I was in the financial side," he said of his 31st year, when his mother died. "I had just become the controller. She thought I was going to stay in finance. She would be very surprised with what I'm doing today."

By 1988, Mr. Pecker was at the top of CBS, and when those magazines were sold to Hachette Filipacchi in 1988, he went with them. After becoming president and chief executive, he oversaw the American version of Elle as well as Premiere and launched George .

"God, I was president for nine years and I stayed there for 12, and my contract was coming up, and I wanted to own something," he said. "Once I sold out my equity, I didn't own anything anymore. I was 46 years old and I wanted to do something else, and I felt I had one more big deal in me. And I had looked at The National Enquirer in 1989 on the behalf of Hachette. We bid on it and I was there as the president of the company."

That's when he led a buyout of American Media with the investment firm Evercore Partners, with him holding a minority stake. It was the beginning of Mr. Pecker's signature vision for magazines.

"I saw there was a huge opportunity to take the tabloids more mainstream, turn them around and use the distribution company to grow the commercial magazine business," Mr. Pecker said. "I thought there was an opportunity, with the tabloids, to add consumer magazines and eventually take the company public.

"Everybody thought I had lost my mind," Mr. Pecker continued. "They couldn't understand why I would leave and go do this. Now, those same people-who before thought I was insane-are telling me how the picture looks much clearer."

Newcomers to the World Wide Web, Mr. Hirschorn and Mr. Andersen have learned quickly, adopting an Internet-style protectiveness for their nascent project. They've asked their potential hires to sign confidentiality agreements. Mr. Manley: "I'm not allowed to talk about it." Mr. Marks: "I cannot confirm that. Neither can I deny that."

But sources familiar with the project who are not bound by confidentiality agreements said the Web magazine will cover what's going on in various fronts of media land, from advertising to Hollywood to publishing and music. By publishing on the Web, the magazine will have an obvious advantage over its print rivals when it comes to breaking news.

But such instant information may not come free. At the moment, the plan seems to be to make users pay. That puts the site at a bit of a risk: The only successful pay Web sites are those that offer information to help people trade from their home computers ( The Street.com , The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition ) or the ones that spew out pornography.

On the other hand, the Hirschorn-Andersen site will offer trade information to people in the entertainment business who are inclined to pay–and pay well–for up-to-the-minute insider dope. And some portion of the site will be free.

Mr. Hirschorn, when contacted, refused to comment.

Since one of their fellow reporters was fired after being arrested for assaulting a Los Angeles cop with a blue Pilot pen, some of the hard-boiled tabloid snoops who work for Star and The National Enquirer are wondering just what their new boss, David Pecker, thinks he bought earlier this year. Mr. Pecker ran Hachette Filipacchi magazines before throwing in with former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman and the Evercore Partners investment firm in buying American Media Inc., which runs the weeklies. Mr. Pecker has spent a great deal of time talking about how he was planning to take the tabloids upmarket to appeal to advertisers and the masses of people who are underserved with accurate celebrity information. He wants to compete with People magazine and reap the rewards of increased ad revenue. So he redesigned the pages, advertised it more, and even, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal , offered $50,000 "from his own pocket" to be donated to charity "if any potential advertiser can find an alien, U.F.O. or a picture of Elvis" in The Enquirer . (He didn't mention the Weekly World News , which American Media also owns, which actually does U.F.O. and Elvis stories and which will escape the Pecker overhaul.)

But then, according to sources at American Media, he got rid of an employee–in their eyes, for doing no more than practicing normal tabloid tactics. The reporter, David Sargeant, had been working for Star for less than a year when, on Aug. 10, he was assigned to stake out the North Hollywood home of ex-Captain Kirk, William Shatner, on the occasion of the apparently accidental swimming pool death of his wife, Nerine Shatner. As the Los Angeles Times reported it, Mr. Sargeant was charged with felony battery of a police officer after an incident at 2:40 A.M. when detectives at the station refused to grant an interview. "He created this big scene. He wouldn't leave," the District Attorney's office told the Times . Shortly thereafter, Mr. Sargeant allegedly stabbed an officer with his pen and was arrested.

According to sources at the tabloid, an outraged Mr. Pecker personally intervened to keep Star from paying for Mr. Sargeant's bail and for his lawyer–standard practice at the company in the past. And it wasn't until three days later, after several tabloid veterans, including senior editor Richard Gooding, personally protested, that the paper agreed to pay for legal counsel for their reporter. "In the end, they did the right thing," said one Star source. Still, two months later, on Oct. 7, Mr. Sargeant was fired. (Mr. Gooding wouldn't comment.)

Mr. Sargeant hired his own lawyer, Elizabeth Kessel, to negotiate his exit from the paper. Citing a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he joined Star , Mr. Sargeant refused to comment to The Observer . But his lawyer said, "I think that basically what the company did was abandon him just when he needed them. He's in the trenches going in to get the best story he can, and I think it's just unconscionable that your employer says just get out there and get the best story, and if you get in trouble they won't help."

None of which has made Star a particularly happy place. "The feeling is that this guy [Mr. Pecker] doesn't know what he's doing," said a tabloid reporter familiar with the situation. "This isn't fancy magazine publishing. It's British gutter journalism transplanted. It can't be good news for people out there going through people's garbage."

When asked about Mr. Sargeant, Richard Valvo, a company spokesman, said, "David Pecker treated him according to company policy. The company policy American Media has in place for handling any employee procedure, no matter what it may be, is the same as the one he used at other companies in the past," presumably including Hachette Filipacchi magazines. When asked what that entailed, the spokesman said, "I'm not going to get into that," and refused to comment further, citing Mr. Sargeant's upcoming arraignment Nov. 1.

"It should act as a chilling effect on every reporter out there trying to get the story," said Ms. Kessel.

But Mr. Valvo said the company policies are clear. "Why should we get bad press for it? We didn't do it."

State Supreme Court Justice Harold Beeler is determined not to let parking garage developer Abe Hirschfeld turn his Manhattan courtroom into the kind of kooky morass that he made his tax-evasion trial last summer. But the judge is doing it in part by dragging in two of the city's newspapers and issuing subpoenas for information.

Justice Beeler is presiding over Mr. Hirschfeld's murder-for-hire trial, which is just getting started. During the tax-evasion proceedings, which ended in a hung jury, Mr. Hirschfeld took out a two-page ad in The New York Times proclaiming his innocence. There were other shenanigans during the trial, including a "protest" by some of his supporters outside the courthouse, as well as a lot of jokes and seemingly irrelevant material presented by Mr. Hirschfeld, who was acting as his own lawyer. After the jury deadlocked, he gave them each $2,500 and staged a banquet for them.

To avoid those kinds of embarrassing pranks, Assistant District Attorney Gilda Mariani got the judge to put a gag order on Mr. Hirschfeld, banning him from taking out newspaper ads, holding rallies and offering rewards that could influence the jury. So the judge was not particularly happy when the Daily News published an advertisement on Oct. 11 that could affect the jury's opinion of the case. The ad was a reprint of an Oct. 7 News article titled "I Assumed Hirschfeld Wanted Hit, Sez Witness." The ad stated that it had been "paid for by Abraham Alcalay" and gave a Houston Street address. A call to telephone information had no listing for an Abraham Alcalay in the Manhattan business or residential directories.

The judge issued subpoenas to the News and the New York Post , which ran a similar ad that week, to find out who paid for the ads.

Daily News vice president and deputy general counsel Eve Burton got the subpoena on Oct. 19. "It sought business-related information, and therefore we complied," she said. "We were all but assured that there would be no request regarding news-gathering information, which we defend aggressively."

Since Jonathan Alter escaped their clutches, Hachette Filipacchi has gone looking elsewhere on the Newsweek masthead for the new editor of George . They've approached Michael Elliott, a New York-based Brit who edits Newsweek International . No announcement is likely to be made about a new editor until after a deal has been completed for Hachette to buy full control of the magazine from the Kennedy family. But Mr. Elliott appears to be the front-runner for the job, and he's got the right C.V. He was Washington bureau chief of The Economist before joining Newsweek six years ago. And he has some of that can-do optimism that has come to characterize George : Three years ago, he published a book called The Day Before Yesterday: Rediscovering America's Past, Rediscovering the Present , in which he argued that the country has not gone to hell in a hand basket since the end of World War II … The title of Condé Nast's new "shopping" magazine, which is being put together by Kim France: Mine .

Hachette chairman Daniel Filipacchi called all the editors and publishers in the company's offices at 1633 Broadway into the 45th-floor corporate conference room at 4:30 P.M. to announce Mr. Pecker's departure. By all accounts, the announcement was made without any fanfare, although it came as a surprise to both the editors and Hachette executives.

Mr. Pecker made a lot of noise in his nine years at Hachette. He quickly got a reputation for buying magazines on the cheap and running them even cheaper. He fought with the Magazine Publishers of America, and eventually pulled out of the organization for ignoring the usual church-state boundaries delineated in the industry between advertising and editorial integrity. In 1996, in one of his most brazen moves, he forced the editors of Premiere to kill an article on a partnership imbroglio at the Planet Hollywood restaurant chain at the request of Ronald Perelman, who at the time was a 50 percent owner of the magazine. After Mr. Pecker gave them the order, Premiere 's two top editors resigned. Mr. Pecker really didn't care. "The last time I looked," he told reporters, "I am C.E.O. of the company."

Mr. Pecker's colleagues may not be so sad to see him go. "People are happy because he manages like an accountant," said one Hachette executive. "It makes it hard to do magazines here. You don't have any money to spend."

Mr. Pecker is paired with a group of investors who are purchasing American Media, which rules its tabloid media empire from headquarters in Lantana, Fla. The investor group, Evercore Capital Partners, a New York City-based buyout company, is set to pay $767 million in cash for the publicly traded company. According to an announcement released by Evercore the same day, the company "entered into a definitive merger agreement providing for the acquisition by an affiliate of Evercore of all the outstanding shares of American Media." Evercore also announced that Mr. Pecker will become chief executive of American Media and will get an equity stake in the company. In February, in the face of stiff competition, American Media shut down Soap Opera News and Soap Opera Magazine , and sold its trademarks to Primedia Inc. Mr. Pecker will remain at Hachette through March 31. A Hachette press release stated, "A successor will be announced at a later date."

M usician , which had a pretty good run in the 1980's as the celebrity-froth-free rock and jazz magazine for people who actually know how to play music, was shut down on Feb. 8. Its glory days were long past. In the last few years, as its original writers and editors left, it had morphed into a trade publication, a practical monthly guide for the working musician with features on the importance of health insurance, "two-track ambient recording" and investment guidance from such musical luminaries as former Journey drummer Steve Smith and "techno rocker" Moby. "It was like watching your child get lobotomized," said Vic Garbarini, who was editor in chief from 1979 to 1985.

The magazine was started by two friends, Gordon Baird and Sam Holdsworth, in Boulder, Colo., in 1976. They later relocated the editorial offices to New York. A 1980 interview with Paul McCartney, published not long before John Lennon's death, put the magazine on the map. Indeed , a recording of the interview was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1981. By then, Messrs. Baird and Holdsworth had brought enough marquee value to Musician to attract the interest of Billboard , the music industry trade bible, which bought the magazine in 1981.

As Charles M. Young, a writer and editor at Musician from 1983 until 1996, put it, "The writers all knew something about music," and unlike the more star-oriented Rolling Stone , " Musician got into the mystical side and the technical side of music." In short, the magazine catered to an audience of music cognoscenti, picking the brains of a rogues' gallery of musicians-Keith Richards, Joe Satriani, Elvis Costello, Sinead O'Connor, U2, T-Bone Burnett, Morrissey, George Clinton, Nirvana-and getting them to wax about everything from the music they made to what brand of microphones they preferred.

It worked well enough that, at a certain point in the mid-1980's, Billboard considered taking the 125,000-circulation magazine to the next level, beefing up its circulation and making it more of a mass-market read, like Rolling Stone . But the owners decided to keep it small. Mr. Garbarini said that in the 80's, the plan worked and the magazine was "making money hand over foot." The stay-small-and-focused strategy continued under editor Bill Flanagan, who kept the rock icon interviews and new music coverage coming after he took the helm in 1985.

But according to Mr. Young, the magazine was slow to pick up on grunge and "the atmosphere in the offices got rather toxic in the early 90's." By now, Billboard had become a part of the BPI Publishing empire, alongside The Hollywood Reporter and Amusement Business , and the management at BPI began to meddle, some former editors said. In 1995, Mr. Flanagan left to become vice president and editorial director at VH1, where he has successfully repackaged the channel along the lines of his version of Musician -minus the technogeek fixation on musicians' hardware.

With Mr. Flanagan gone, BPI hired Robert Doerschuk, a former editor at Keyboard magazine, to make Musician less mystical, as it were, and more practical-that is, a trade magazine for working musicians. After the publisher was fired, the offices were moved to Nashville in 1998, where Amusement Business is published. (Mr. Doerschuk declined to comment.) There it remained, pumping out its no-bones financial and technical advice until it was put out of its misery.

Mr. Garbarini, a Playboy contributor these days who also lives in Nashville and had kept in touch with the staff, lamented that the magazine had become a dry manual about the business. It was about "'Tell me about your business plan,'" he said. "And nobody was interested. Of course they weren't!" A source at the magazine confirmed that Musician 's circulation had sagged recently. It was Mr. Garbarini's understanding from talking to people at the magazine that circulation was down to about 50,000.

Howard Lander, president of Billboard Music Group, referred calls to Karen Oertley, an executive in Nashville who oversaw Musician . Through her assistant, she said, "We suspended monthly publication, but we will continue to do the Musician 's Guide to Touring and Promotion twice a year."

Slowly, reporters and editors at The Wall Street Journal are learning something about class-consciousness. The same week they got news that the Dow Jones & Company's plump 50-year-old profit-sharing plan was being tossed into the Hudson in a corporate rethink, they learned that their afternoon coffee service was being canceled.

Every day, the cart arrived in the elevator lobby of the 10th-floor newsroom at around 3 P.M. Its purveyor, a man named Angel, would walk around the halls ringing a bell, notifying the droopy-eyed reporters that he was there to caffeinate them. (He also sold cookies, fruit and popcorn.) But one day in late January, Angel told everyone that his rounds would end as of Feb. 1, leaving the undercaffeinated with the prospect of having to take the elevator down to the Au Bon Pain in the building's lobby.

First their retirement plan, now the afternoon coffee cart. This was a low blow indeed. A Dow Jones spokesman explained that the decision to eliminate the afternoon coffee routine was made by Eurest Dining Services, the catering company, and was not related to any corporate cost-cutting. But the newly empowered staff swung into action, quickly circulating a petition and securing the return of the coffee cart. "In the face of a popular uprising, they capitulated," said Dow Jones spokesman Richard Tofel. "This is probably a bad thing for Au Bon Pain."

That grass-roots victory in hand, the staff has embarked on another 70's-style protest: The week of Feb. 8, many started wearing union buttons declaring: "I ™ My Retirement Benefits." There is also talk among the increasingly disgruntled editorial staff of boycotting appearances on CNBC, which Dow Jones has a stake in. Laura Kaplan, an organizer for The Journal 's union, the Independent Association of Publishers' Employees, said that negotiations with Dow Jones for the next three-year contract haven't begun yet, but that they didn't plan to include afternoon coffee.

With only the dust marks of a reproduction Wurlitzer jukebox marking the spot where editor in chief Michael Caruso used to be, Details is struggling to hold onto enough editors to keep things going until Mark Golin is released from his contract at Maxim . According to the Details staff, articles editor Susan Murcko and West Coast editor David Keeps-who should be used to crisis management by now, having had to fill in after Joe Dolce's sudden departure two years ago-are marshalling the staff, along with executive editor Barbara O'Dair, who's been called in from maternity leave. But even as the incoming editor gets down to the hard work of taking writers affiliated with Details out for get-to-know-you drinks, some editors aren't sticking around to see what the Golin era will bring. As of Feb. 12, two senior features editors have left-Michael Hainey to be a senior editor at GQ , and Tim Moss to freelance (the latter move had been planned for some time). Robert Levine, the associate editor hired by Mr. Caruso to oversee music coverage, has left to take the post of senior associate editor in Alan Light's new regime at Spin .

Over at Spin , Mr. Light has moved quickly to shore up the editorial staff after Miller Publishing's Jan. 19 ouster of editor in chief Michael Hirschorn and executive editor Craig Marks. Senior editor Sia Michel has been rechristened as music editor and saddled with the three-ring circus that Mr. Marks' job had become after seven years (i.e., editing features, supplying Spin with fresh voices and pop cultural vision, and keeping diplomatic ties with the often chaotic recording industry) . Will Hermes, a frequent contributor to Spin , The Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly , has been brought in as reviews editor-a job Mr. Light had been filling in on when Mr. Hirschorn was axed. Lisa Steinmeyer is staying on as art director, only without the influence of "creative consultants" Markus Kiersztan and Christiaan Kuypers (known around the office as "Hans and Franz"), who have also vacated the premises.

Mr. Golin's contract at Maxim has just under three months to go and, according to Drew Kerr, a publicist for Dennis Publishing, Maxim 's owner, "It's pretty simple. When his replacement is found, he's free to go." Essentially, this means a hiring freeze over at Details , where bodies are needed. People familiar with the situation say he is likely to bring over his second-in-command, Catherine Romano, whose title at Maxim is "editrix." Ms. Romano made the journey from Cosmopolitan to Maxim with Mr. Golin, where, Mr. Kerr confirmed, they pulled down the same salary.