Marina Khidekel. (Photo credit: Twitter)

Marina Khidekel has been named the new deputy editor at Cosmopolitan, FishbowlNY reports. Ms. Khidekel comes over to the Hearst tower from Condé Nast, where she was a senior articles editor at Glamour and covered health.This is the latest in a series of staffing changes at the magazine since Joanna Coles took the helm as EIC in September. Last week, Ms. Coles fired nine staffers--seven of whom were in the features department.

“New incoming editors in chief often want to form their own teams,”said a Cosmopolitan spokesperson said last week. “We will be announcing more new hires shortly.”

Looks like the spokesperson meant it when she said shortly. Ms. Khidekel started at Cosmo this week, according to Media Bistro.

Reached at home in Colorado, Ms. Hearst told Off the Record that the company should “have a moral compass and put it in an opaque bag and make it sold only to adults.”

It’s a proposition that’s unlikely to go over well with her relatives on the corporation’s board. Cosmo’s cover lines, though comically blunt (“Your Orgasm Guaranteed,” “Um, Vagina, Are You Okay Down There?”), help make it the best selling consumer magazine on American newsstands. But Ms. Hearst is accustomed to being a black sheep.

While her cousins and nieces appear on magazine mastheads and in society columns, Ms. Hearst used her inheritance to buy a 10,000 sq. foot barn in Ridgway, Colo., where she founded Praise Him Ministries in 2001.

A born again Christian since getting out of a bad relationship in the ‘90s, Ms. Hearst felt a sense of familiarity when she saw the campaign’s leader—model and aspiring actress Nicole Weider—interviewed by Pat Robertson on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

“I felt like the Lord was telling me I needed to talk to the company,” she recalled.

Ms. Hearst, 55, remembers when her family brought in Helen Gurley Brown to resuscitate the failing magazine in 1965. “You remember Helen,” she said, “sexual revolution, feminism, blah blah blah.” In high school, Ms. Hearst was an occasional Cosmo girl.

“I didn’t read it religiously,” she told Off the Record. “I looked at it. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

It wasn’t until eleven years ago that she noticed the magazine’s trademark mix of sex tips, confessions, and stories—what she called “the disgusting stuff”—and waged her own war on Cosmo from within the Hearst clan.

Although not a trustee herself, she sent each member of the corporate board a dossier containing opinions on selected Cosmo articles written by two psychiatrists, “one Christian and one non-Christian,” as well as her own opinion, which was “Bible-based.”

She never heard back from the company—“I had apparently been branded a Christian fanatic,” she said—but she had the opportunity to confront some board members three months later, at a family reunion at the Hearst-owned, Northern California estate, Wyntoon. Ms. Hearst said that one cousin told her she agreed with her but was too afraid to speak up, while another told her that he wouldn’t mind if his tween daughter read Cosmo because he wanted her to have a good sex life.

“I understood that he didn’t know the Lord,” Ms. Hearst said.

A telephone call to Hearst CEO Frank Bennack was not much more effective, she told Off The Record, because the two disagreed over the definition of pornography.

“We had a heated discussion,” Ms. Hearst said, “He said, ‘You’re making this out like it’s black and white,’ and I said ‘ No, Frank, it’s green.’”

By today’s standards, few would say Cosmo is pornographic. Ms. Gurley Brown’s hunky centerfolds once drew comparisons to Playboy, but under Kate White the cheesy soft-core visual offerings have all-but disappeared (give or take the stray bare ass). The most scandalous finding in July’s “Guide to his Package”—which the cover boasts is “so hot they made us seal it”—is the essay “Why I Love My Penis,” by Esquire writer Chris Jones.

But one could argue that Ms. Gurley Brown’s please-your-man empowerment—which still reigns in the magazine’s current iteration—has worked out better for Hearst’s bottom line than womankind. Cosmo has grown synonymous with advertiser-friendly, consumptive girl power, enabling Hearst to license more than 60 international editions and become the best-selling magazine in the world. Meanwhile, Cosmo dispenses with advice for what to do when that “steamy hook-up” “ghosts” on you.

Cosmopolitan declined to comment to Off the Record beyond a written statement: “As a magazine written by women for women, Cosmo believes in the first amendment right to freely publish and display the magazine.”

They have yet to respond to Ms. Weider, so this summer she plans to fly a couple dozen of the petition’s 33,000 undersigned to New York, where they will protest outside the magazine’s 8th Avenue headquarters.

“We’re going to embarrass them by putting dirty sex tips from the magazine on our signs,” she  told Off the Record.

In the meantime, she’s been pursuing alternative avenues for change, like writing letters to her Senator and the Federal Trade Commission.

“That’s the only way you’re going to get the Hearst Corporation to change,” Ms. Hearst said.

Ms. Weider sent a letter to FTC Secretary Jon Leibowitz along with issues of the magazine in which she’d flagged references to anal sex. Other major areas of concern include sexting, casual hookups, threesomes and an article that included URLs to female-friendly pornography.

“How is this even legal?” she asked. “If it’s an adult magazine just sell it to adults.”

In this day and age, the notion of protecting young people from sexual knowledge seems naïve (you can’t put an opaque plastic bag over the Internet), but Ms. Weider and Ms. Hearst’s discomfort does reflect something true about Cosmopolitan’s content. Its knowing and adult tone only makes it more alluring to the young and ignorant.

The magazine’s cover girls would seem to confirm as much. In the past six months alone, they have included Dakota Fanning, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. They’re all 18 or older, but their fan bases are much younger.

In fact, Ms. Weider’s campaign began when she saw a group of thirteen- or fourteen-year olds-whispering over an issue of Cosmo featuring Twilight actress Ashley Greene on display at CVS . When she picked up the magazine, she was shocked by what she saw. Although she read the magazine (and hid them from her mother) as a young teenager, she said it was a more innocent time, when Mandy Moore was on the cover and the sex tips involved scrunchies.

“It seriously talked about all these freaky sex positions I’ve never even heard of,” she said of the recent issue.

Around the same time, Ms. Weider, who found God after a self-esteem-crushing period of partying and promiscuity in Hollywood, launched Project Inspired, a Christian blog for girls.

“I wanted to use my experience in Hollywood to influence and impact girls to do the opposite,” she said.

For its part, Cosmo insists it does not market to underage readers.

“Our readers are 18-34 years old, and we have never targeted readers younger than that,” a spokeswoman for the magazine told Off the Record.  Indeed, Cosmo’s media kit for prospective advertisers only discusses the magazine’s 12.9 million readers between the ages of eighteen and 49. But with 15.4 million readers total, that leaves another 2.5 million readers who are either school-aged or menopausal.

Even if all 2.5 million of them are under age and impressionable, the good news is that it a tween-age Cosmo habit hasn’t been proven fatal. Ms. Weider and Ms. Hearst were young readers, after all.

Helen and David. (Image via Hearst Corp.)

With the help of a $30 M. gift from longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University's School of Engineering have established the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the two universities and the Hearst Corporation announced today.

The Institute is inspired by David Brown, Ms. Brown's late husband, a former journalist, publisher, film and theater producer who graduated from both Stanford and Columbia Journalism School.

The collaboration is intended to connect "the best in West Coast technology with East Coast content," according to a joint press release, giving each school $12 M. to endow a professorship. The remaining $6 M. will go toward the construction of a "highly visible signature space at the eastern end of the J-School’s landmark building, featuring a state-of-the-art high-tech newsroom." It will also support graduate and post-graduate fellowships, as well as competitive "Magic Grants" to develop most promising ideas conceived of by Brown fellows. It is the largest gift in Columbia Journalism School's nearly 100-year history.

“David and I have long supported and encouraged bright young people to follow their passions and to create original content," Ms. Brown, who turns 90 next month, said in the announcement. "Great content needs useable technology. Sharing a language is where the magic happens. It’s time for two great American institutions on the East and West Coasts to build a bridge.”

“New York City, as the major center for the television, music, print media and advertising, is profoundly affected by rapidly evolving digital technology,” said Stanford engineering professor Bernd Girod, who is the Institute’s founding director until Columbia appoints his East Coast counterpart. “The Brown Institute will bring together creative innovators skilled in production and delivery of news and entertainment with the entrepreneurial researchers at Stanford working in multimedia technology.”

In December, Stanford withdrew its bid for Mayor Bloomberg’s Roosevelt Island tech campus. The $100 million grant went to Cornell to a 50-50 partnership between Cornell and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; Cornell announced $350 M. gift to back its proposal hours after Stanford dropped out. Carnegie Mellon, one of the rejected proposals, is still working on building an entertainment-tech campus in partnership with Steiner Studios in Brooklyn's Navy Yards.

The cover of the version that went out to advertisers (and the Observer) appears to have been edited to remove all mention of "mind-blowing" activity, which reportedly happens even when the cover girl is of age.

Below find the Observer's neutered copy and the racy newsstand version.

In the profile (titled "Welcome to Your Cosmo Years, Dakota"), Ms. Fanning tells Slate's Jonah Weiner that it might be cool to meet a guy in a coffee shop someday. There's also a photo of her in high fashion bunny ears, captioned "Two years ago, this would have been cute. Now it's hot."

But what if it's Elle in the bunny ears?

Ms. Brzezinski with co-host Joe Scarborough and Arianna Huffington (from HuffingtonPost.com)

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski has been given a monthly column at Cosmopolitan, the magazine announced today.

The column, which launches in the October issue, is called "Getting What You Want." When that phrase appears on Cosmo covers it's typically followed by "in bed" or "from your man," but Ms. Brzezinski will write about "career confidence, empowerment, and getting ahead in the workplace," according to the press release. 

"I've always been a huge fan of Mika on Morning Joe," editor-in-chief Kate White said in the announcement. "She's incredibly smart and perceptive. But once I read her books, I knew she could also offer young women invaluable strategies for attaining the lives and the career successes they fiercely desire."

"How about Mexican?" her friend offered.

"Perfect! But do you think they'd give me just the tortilla? That's all I really want."

It was agreed that the Mexican restaurant would comply. Next issue: how the writer should dye her hair.

"I have to do a celebrity hair-inspired video, so I'm thinking Blake Lively blonde!"

The office was also home to the mobile news site Boy Genius Report, the auto site Oncars, and the film site Movieline. Hollywood Lifers occupied the cubicles nearest the lobby, intently focused on their computer screens.

"Who used my curling iron?" shouted one young woman. "I just want to know!" The Observer was walked past a row of cubicles into a small conference room often used to shoot videos for the site, where we perched on a lipstick-pink director's chair. Before long, the site's editor Bonnie Fuller arrived, and perched in her own chair to talk about Hollywood Life, her most recent project, which launched in November 2009. She was dressed in a snazzy purple floral bandage dress. A glittering cuff bracelet adorned her right wrist.

"Our staff is very, very small compared to a magazine," she said. "But we aim to produce a lot of original content and break a lot of stories--and have opinions."

It's only the latest reinvention for Ms. Fuller, who in recent years went from being the well-paid evil genius of the magazine industry to its most gleefully observed cautionary tale. After first attracting attention for her stewardship of Flare, a Canadian fashion magazine, she went on to edit YM, launch the American version of Marie Claire and helm Cosmopolitan, where her numerically enhanced coverlines ("His Top 20 Sexplanations," February 1998) were legendary.

Also legendary were her high-handedness with her staff and alleged over-reliance on company black cars. A nasty 2004 Vanity Fair profile featured former employees chuckling over Ms. Fuller's gaucheness and boasting about spitting in her food.

In 1998, Ms. Fuller was brought over to Glamour, where she lasted less than three years. In a much-discussed miniscandal, she was fired for her brazen pursuit of the editorship of Harper's Bazaar, a job that eventually went to Glenda Bailey.

Ms. Fuller next landed perhaps her most memorable gig, revitalizing Us Weekly for Jann Wenner. Her cavity-inducing coverlines and demystifying take on modern celebrity ("Stars--They're Just Like Us!") pumped up newsstand sales, distinguished Us from heavyweight People, and spawned a number of copycats: among them, OK!, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and Star.

After walking away from Us Weekly at her peak, surprising colleagues and inviting still more biting press attention, it was on to American Media Inc., where she'd been hired as editorial director overseeing a number of titles, including Star. Ms. Fuller's fall was sudden and would have seemed almost random had it not made for such delicious wish-fulfillment among those who'd long rooted for her demise.

When she left American Media in May 2008, with plans to start a new company, Bonnie Fuller Media, few were heartbroken by the reversal of fortune. Ms. Fuller planned, vaguely, to take on cyberspace with a web startup that promised, as this paper put it, to "approach Ms. Fuller as a brand" and "feature her blogging about topics such as gossip, fashion, and romance."

It wasn't to be.

"My timing was terrible," Ms. Fuller said. "I was getting my business plan ready, and I was ready to start appointments the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed."

Despite that setback, Ms. Fuller eventually found a willing collaborator in Mr. Penske, the flamboyant truck-rental scion, web entrepreneur and serial actress-dater. Mr. Penske was soon to make a tidy sum selling his startup, Mail.com, and was busily assembling a media empire of his own, acquring Nikki Finke's Deadline blog from Village Voice Media in June 2009. He relaunched Hollywood Life, a defunct glossy, as a website several months later, with some design motifs borrowed from Us Weekly: a neon-colored palette, big pictures, eye-catching captions.

"Women love to look at pictures," Ms. Fuller said.

Though the site is not yet profitable, it attracted a respectable 3.5 million unique visitors in April 2011 and includes CoverGirl and Microsoft among its advertisers. Ms. Fuller added that a planned expansion and redesign of the site's beauty coverage is underway.

The shuttering of Bonnie Fuller Media meant focusing less on the planned Bonnie-as-brand organizing principle and more on celebrity news, Ms. Fuller's métier.

Nonetheless, she has become a personality on the site, penning a regular "Bonnie Says" column and maintaining a Twitter feed with some over 13,000 followers.

On May 11, she Tweeted, "RIP Bob Marley: let's not forget how u worked to end violence in Jamaica. Died far too soon of melanoma at age 36." She stridently points out that she loves her iPad, which she uses on the commute into Grand Central Station (no more Town cars).

Though one of Ms. Fuller's key deputies, general manager Will Lee, is the former New York bureau chief for TMZ, Hollywood Life's coverage tends to be considerably sunnier and more friendly than its more aggressive, sometimes apocalyptic counterpart.

Ms. Fuller's vision with the site, she said, was "to use celebrity news as the entry point into women's lives, to use it as a kind of a lens to talk about their relationships, and their diet issues, and their style and beauty issues, and their friendship issues, and their decisions about whether to have a family." Articles tend to end with questions, inviting reader feedback.

In a sense, the concept behind "Stars: They're Just Like Us" informs the entire site. Her audience, Ms. Fuller said, views celebrities "almost as their good friends." She elaborated, "If they look at J.Lo's issues with fertility and suddenly she has twins, it gives them hope that they could do that."

The leveling effect works in reverse as well, turning the site's writers into demi-celebrities. "I always felt very strongly that the reporters and editors, the writers, should also have name recognition on the site," she said, noting that contributor photos are also prominently featured. "They should be a part of the circle of friends: just as we see celebrities as part of our circle of friends, we're your friends."

The writers seem to appreciate the attention. Chloe Melas, an entertainment reporter who has been at the site since its inception (she previously worked at CNN after her graduation from Alabama's Auburn University), contributes news reports as well as a column, "Chloe Says."

"I just want to be a very relatable girl," Ms. Melas told The Observer. "I want to be our demographic. We have guys writing for the site, and Bonnie's more the mother-of-four role. I'm a girl in my 20's, out there dating and figuring stuff out."

Ms. Melas noted that her duties extend far beyond blogging. "I wear many hats," she said. "I have a lot of responsibilities and I really like it that way--you bite off as much as you can chew and then some!" She has a weekly on-air spot on Fox 5 news discussing celebrity goings-on and reports frequently at red-carpet events. "I love the adrenaline before I talk to a celebrity," she said. "I'm jealous of myself!"

Her staffers' challenge is considerable, Ms. Fuller said. "You have to do a lot more with a lot less," she said. "It forces you to focus on the content and the celebrities and the areas of interest that your audience is the most obsessed with."

As for her own celebrity obsessions, Ms. Fuller has none. "It's who our audience is most interested in," she said. "They're very interested in Kristen [Stewart] and Rob [Pattinson], Twilight people, Taylor Lautner, Kim Kardashian, a lot of the reality show people, Kim particularly. Sometimes Khloé. They're interested in her fertility struggle--her infertility struggle."

The web has allowed Ms. Fuller instant feedback on which stories work, a luxury she didn't enjoy as a print editor. Despite a reputation for keen instincts, "it was frustrating," she said. Publishing a magazine is "a one-way conversation at all times. You're always putting it out there!"

She added, "It's hard to gauge because the audiences today are so of-the-moment--so A.D.D.--that three months later, they forgot what they were interested in three months ago!"

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

--How is the apocryphal John Gotti movie getting press for the Gotti family? (Hint: it's not by writing and filming a movie that you can pay money to go see!)

--What New York quasi-landmark no longer darkens Vogue's doorstep?

--Name 500 ways that the flirtiest, sexiest media partnership can please you and your man.

--What TV news has the homebound sadder than usual today?

--What's James Franco's next project--and does it have seven types of ambiguity, or zero?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

"I like to be around smart people," she said without missing a beat. Ms. Levine's first magazine job was at Hearst's Cosmopolitan, so it's no surprise she knows what a "real" woman wants.

"I'm an IQ snob. I'm turned on by people who know something that I don't know."

Cosmo is not first known for its brainy quotient, but it does spell industry cunning. The "fun, fearless, female" brand is internationally beloved and distributed in over a hundred countries.

Like a Gucci handbag, Ms. Levine said, "You need to create an I-need-to-have-it factor, an emotional connection to the product."

It's a strategy that has made Hearst resilient. Ms. Levine thought the shaky economy would doom the brand new Food Network Magazine to be ignored by advertisers and readers alike. "I just thought, 'There's no way--I'm just going to kill myself right now,' she said of the day in May when the market took an unexpected 1000 point plunge. "The windows were sealed, so that didn't happen."

"But what I didn't realize was that a need had been created. People weren't going out to eat anymore. They were staying home."

Food Network Magazine was a recession life raft for Hearst, turning a healthy profit within 6 months.  "It didn't make people feel bad. It made them feel good," Ms. Levine said. "They would stay home and cook like a star, and entertain their neighbors. We had hit the right emotional chord." Hearst is now launching an HGTV magazine modeled on Food Network's success.

Now the publisher is healthy enough to spend a reported $900 million to take over Elle, Woman's Day and Car and Driver to the family, to be purchased from Paris-based Lagardere. Under Ms. Levine, it's safe to say the magazines will be aimed to appeal to a wider audience than, say, a class of snarky J-school students.

"In New York City the journalistic critics vomit all over Cosmo," she said, "They miss the fact that there's a very different demographic across the country. Reading Cosmo doesn't mean that you have a low IQ, or that you're not a serious person. Serious people like to laugh too."

What inspired this unlikely market entry? Louis Vuitton!

Duncan Edwards, chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, said Mongolia became an ideal place to expand Cosmopolitan as the country's economy modernized and the business climate became more hospitable to foreign operations. He said the idea to start a Mongolian edition came to him over dinner one night when an executive from Louis Vuitton told him the company had just opened a store in Ulan Bator.

The debut issue has Nicole Scherzinger of The Pussycat Dolls on the cover, and, according to the Times, an article about Cosmo's history of advocating for women's rights and a profile of former editor Helen Gurley Brown.

We would love to translate more of the cover lines but we, like Hearst, don't read Khalkha Mongolian.

"We don't have the ability to read every edition in every language," Mr. Edwards said. "We select editions from time to time and have sections translated."