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

The new buyer will also have to provide all the services Primedia has been providing for the magazine without counting them against New York 's profits. A new owner would likely see losses of somewhere between $1 and $2 million a year after counting those in, several bidders said.

"You're really buying a distressed situation," said one source familiar with the situation.

Reached for comment, a Primedia spokesman did not respond before deadline.

Whoever buys New York won't be buying Clay Felker's New York from 1969. They're not even buying New York circa 1999. Eight staffers, including columnist Michael Tomasky, have left the magazine in as many months. For some time now, New York has not set the agenda.

"It doesn't have the hipness of Time Out or the sophistication of Vanity Fair ," Eric Blankfein, a vice president of Horizon Media, an ad-buying firm, said. "The only thing it has is its name and history. But that's also a negative because it hasn't really evolved over time."

The name and the history have been enough for some. For nearly three months, half the lunch crowd at Michael's has jostled and tussled to be known as contenders for ownership of New York . If the magazine has been the subject of much know-it-all eye-rolling in media circles in recent years, it is also fondly remembered from the days of Clay Felker. In the beginning, there were supposed sightings of secret alliances between media impresario Steve Brill and Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein. There was Michael Wolff and his very public disclosure of his would-be partnership with Donny Deutsch. Mort Zuckerman made it clear, before a sale was even announced, his intentions to bid, while the Malibu-based Curtco Robb Media remained stealth in its interest. Then there's former Hachette Filipacchi C.E.O. turned tabloid king David Pecker who all along, in the vein of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction has been steaming "I will not be ignored."

Who among these bidders can save New York? These kinds of races notoriously admit of dark horses. But whoever emerges as the buyer will have an enduring challenge: taking New York magazine and making it work again.

And that is, first of all, a matter of money. Reading the fine print, the magazine's circulation is not what it might have seemed to the outside observer. Since 1998, the magazine has held its "rate base"-the circulation number publishers use to set ad rates-at 425,000. However, according to sources, the book provided to would-be bidders shows that number is grossly exaggerated. According to sources, 22 percent of that circulation comes from subscription agents-independent operators hired by a magazine to maintain subscription numbers. New York also counts, according to sources, another 20 percent of its rate base from free placement copies in venues like hotels. In total, New York sees no revenue from 42 percent of its stated rate base.

Making matters worse, bidders have not been given audited circulation numbers; sources said that's because the magazine hasn't produced an audit for two years.

Of course, every magazine uses agents and placements to maintain its numbers. But for New York's new owner it could mean having to invest significant sums of money just to get the magazine living up to its publicity. Because, while the use of agents not only generates little revenue, it also serves as a kind of temporary Band-Aid, since many subscribers reached through agents don't renew after the first year. For many years, according to sources, Primedia has avoided a significant direct-mail campaign, which, while expensive initially, is a better way to ensure subscription money that continues to flow from one year to the next.

While the book shows projected earnings for this year of a little more than $1 million, it doesn't account for overhead costs currently incurred by Primedia. These include, among other things, the cost of the magazine's circulation and manufacturing departments, attorneys and accountants. Those costs, borne by Primedia's corporate superstructure, don't make it on to New York 's balance sheets but could be a significant drain on resources to the magazine's new ownership. One source estimated that, if these services were counted against New York 's profits, the magazine's would actually lose money each year-anywhere from $1 million to $2 million.

"It could be worse than that," a source said.

And, as with all magazines that change hands, the new owners will be saddled with burdensome contractual obligations, including expensive long-term printing and pre-press contracts. There also remain questions about the magazine's previous branding arrangements-including its Internet relationship with Cablevision in place since March 2000-and the limitations a would-be buyer would have in using the brand.

Perhaps the only good news for New York in the last year has been the sale itself. News of the sale made the magazine something to talk about again. In the three months following the announcement of the sale, the magazine's ad pages rose 9 percent. It's hard to tell how the whole year will look: The magazine's ad pages are down 6.52 percent-an improvement over 2001, when ad pages fell 9.11 percent, and fairly typical in the current tough market. But if the new owner hopes to make a profit elsewhere on the balance sheet, there's not a lot of room to cut back expenses.

"I'd be very surprised if Primedia left a lot on the table," said Scott Peters, managing director of the Jordan, Edmiston Group, the media investment bank. "They're a fairly shrewd and smart operation in terms of cost control and efficiency. It's not an obvious cost-saving opportunity. For any buyers to come in, they will come in with the view of it as a growth story on top."

It would certainly have to be for David Pecker to buy it. One American Media source said Mr. Pecker wants to grow the magazine on the newsstand through his company's massive distribution network, while putting his newly-crowned editorial director Bonnie Fuller, who has long experience moving magazines on the stands, in charge.

It doesn't take much imagination to consider running New York a step up for Ms. Fuller, who is rolling in more than money over at the Star . Owning it could also give her boss, Mr. Pecker, a "legitimate" platform in the New York media world to which the supermarket tabloids can't possibly aspire.

And Mr. Pecker's strategy has worked for national magazines like Star and Enquirer . But as recently as 1995, Time Out New York found itself reversing its newsstand approach to profit-making, and now gets most of its rate base through subscriptions. Can it work for a local magazine now if it didn't in 1995?

On the other hand Mr. Pecker has shown his aptitude for fixer-uppers. His company just bought quite a few of those-including Shape and Men's Fitness last January for $350 million. While the move added legitimate brands to American Media's franchise, and was a step away from the company's dying tabloid brands, it also raised the company's debt to $ 1 billion. This, for an outfit planning to go public next year. (A spokesman said Mr. Pecker was unavailable for comment.)

With sources counting many of the really large media bidders-Tribune, Emmis, Advance-out of the running, Mr. Pecker could well be as good a buyer as any.

But then there's Mr. Zuckerman. Mr. Zuckerman does not need a partner. He has advertising and circulation people in place who could absorb a lot of New York 's operations without tremendous capital expenditure, and another weekly magazine ( U.S. News and World Report ) and a New York newspaper (the Daily News ) already under his control. He has his own media magician, Daily News associate publisher and editorial director Martin Dunn, who sources said would look after New York in addition to the News if Mr. Zuckerman bought the magazine.

Mr. Dunn is also a tabloid man. He led the Daily News in the last tabloid war against the New York Post . The results are already showing in the News -with its front-page editorializing and splashy celebrity coverage serving up a burlesque of the Post each day.

A spokesman for Mr. Zuckerman would only say he was interested in the magazine.

Is this-the editorial direction of a Bonnie Fuller, of a Martin Dunn-the future of New York ?

Magazine consultant Marvin Walker offered a sobering thought.

"The only way things get better is if New York becomes more cutting edge with much tougher reads," Mr. Walker said. "It's become very soft and there are better listing publications out there."

Build a better magazine, a gathering place for the social elite-people who advertisers want to reach-and those dollars will come.

Whether the kind of company that can afford to take on New York is also the kind of company that will give the magazine the kind of parenting it needs remains to be seen.

"The original New York , when Clay Felker did it, did a lot of investigative reporting and gained attention because of the articles," Mr. Walker said. "It's lost that edge. It needs to get it back."

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 .

"It was Friday, when the magazine closes," said New Yorker literary and fiction editor Bill Buford, who said he'd called several of his friends with the bad news. "We had a story by García Márquez that could have run. It could have been embarrassing. But it didn't check out."

Like all convincing hoaxes, this one was effective partly because it had some grounding in reality: Mr. García Márquez, 72, was admitted to a hospital in Bogotá on June 24, suffering from "general exhaustion syndrome," and had previously been treated for a tumor in his lung.

A woman at Mr. García Márquez's agency in Barcelona confirmed that the writer was still alive and that reports of his death were "just a stupid joke, probably."

Faced with paying for its expensive coverage in Kosovo, The New York Times asked its various departments in mid-May to try to cut back 5 percent on spending for the rest of the year. But according to sources in the photo department, the collateral damage fell especially hard on them: The photo department has been asked to cut back around 20 percent of its budget.

The photo desk is "definitely the hardest hit," said one Times source. The Times is laying off nonunion workers at the photo desk and editors are being "more circumspect" in making photo assignments to freelancers, according to Times sources.

But Times assistant managing editor Allan Siegal said, "The request for budget savings has been no greater for photo than for any other department." He would not go into specific numbers about how much people were asked to save, but noted, "The budget is a very fluid thing here."

The Star wants to move beyond the supermarket checkout line. Right now it's not much different from its sister publication, The National Enquirer . But when American Media chief executive David Pecker gets through with it, it'll be his version of the celebrity-fuzzy holy grail of magazines right now, In Style , or the European fame chronicler, Hello! That's the plan, anyway.

Peter Arnell, who designed Elle when Mr. Pecker ran its parent company, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines, is redoing the Star and setting up an ad campaign for the fall to knock home its new image. American Media is also looking for midtown space for the Star , which has its headquarters in Tarrytown, N.Y. The Enquirer 's offices are in Lantana, Fla. A proper New York bureau is going to be set up for it under its new news editor, Barry Levine, who was brought in from the syndicated TV show Extra last month.

Mr. Pecker had talks with the New York Post 's Page Six columnist, Richard Johnson, this past spring about having some role at the new Star , but nothing came of it. "Richard chose to stay at the Post because he's got such a good job," said Ed Hayes, the lawyer who represents Mr. Johnson.

Condé Nast skipper Steve Florio completed his nautically themed Oyster Bay, L.I., home not long ago, and you can examine his taste in the new issue of the Condé Nast magazine House & Garden . Mr. Florio is coyly referred to as "a top executive at a large media company" in the text. Adding to the giggles, the piece tells about how, when planning the house, his wife "went through dozens of magazines (she could!)" to find what she was looking for.

Condé Nast spokesman Maurie Perl confirmed that it was Mr. Florio's house, explaining that, "it's a fairly common practice" to not include the owner's name in the magazine, so that "the focus is on the house and the architect and not on the owners."

The house, described as a "turn-of-the-century shingled cottage with a dramatic foyer, graceful wraparound porches and … views from every window," is situated near those of Richard Aurelio, the retired president of New York 1 News, Charles Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision Systems Corporation, and Charles Wang, the chief executive of Computer Associates International Inc. It's across an inlet from the Seawanhaka Yacht Club, where Mr. Florio is a member.

True to his job as Condé Nast president, Mr. Florio has got the product placement going: Ralph Lauren Home Collection is his designer of choice. Apropos of nothing, a white box marked "Chanel" is pictured on the living room table.

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.

But three years later, things don't look so rosy. According to the Media Industry Newsletter , as of November 1998, George 's total ad pages were down 5.21 percent from 1997, and ad pages in the December 1998 issue had dipped by 20 percent compared to the year before. What's more, the editorial vision is still a bit murky. Now, Ms. Mitchell finds herself forced out of her job, following the appearance of an item in the New York Post on Jan. 6 that basically announced that Hachette was pressuring Mr. Kennedy to hire a "hands-on editor" to skipper the magazine and "bring it to the next level." Sources at George , which has the tag line "Not Just Politics as Usual," chalked the piece up to a bruising game of the same old corporate politics as usual that Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Pecker have been playing since the magazine's fortunes began to decline. Score for now: Pecker 1, Kennedy 0.

Ms. Mitchell was well regarded, well liked and possibly in over her head, current and former employees at the magazine said. "Eric kind of dissed John," said one former staff member, referring to Ms. Mitchell's predecessor, Mr. Etheridge (a former editor at The Observer ). But "Biz knew her role." As another editor put it, "She understood that this was his magazine. He didn't feel like just riding his bike downtown; he wanted to actually do it." But when she ascended to executive editor, she was stepping, if not over, at least by, another ambitious senior editor, Richard Blow. According to sources at George , Mr. Blow, the former editor of the defunct Washington, D.C., power magazine Regardie's , had expected to get the job. By most accounts, Ms. Mitchell "got along really well" with Mr. Kennedy as he learned the ropes and honed the magazine's appeal to college-educated thirtysomething women who weren't political junkies. The plan? "A political magazine for people who don't like politics," explained one former contributor.

But from Hachette's perspective, that plan apparently wasn't working as well as it should. And so, a vaguely sourced item made its appearance in the Post . When it ran on Jan. 6, it went off "like a bomb" in George 's office, said one staff member. Nobody was expecting it, and in addition to asserting that Mr. Kennedy was shopping Ms. Mitchell's job around, it also implied that she was somehow a temp at that position instead of, as one current editor put it, "a skilled and unquestioned No. 2." The Post didn't quote Mr. Kennedy, or anyone else for that matter.

Staff members, used to living with a gossip-hounded celebrity, say that they just decided to withhold judgment on its accuracy until Mr. Kennedy returned from out of town. And, anyway, firing someone in the press wasn't his style. ("He's classy," said one staff member.) According to a person familiar with the situation, Ms. Mitchell decided there was no place for her at George after she met with Mr. Kennedy on the afternoon of Jan. 7. She was gone the next morning, when Mr. Kennedy announced Mr. Blow's promotion to the staff.

Mr. Blow, the Washington affairs editor, has been at the magazine since the start. He's the one responsible for bringing in such writers and columnists as David Brock, Tony Blankley, Claire Shipman and Lisa DePaulo, all of whom have provided much of the noncelebrity content in the magazine in recent months. That said, it was hard for many familiar with the magazine to imagine how Mr. Blow would provide much of a break from the magazine as it is now, with its uneven run of features, stale gossip, filler photo spreads, half-baked "rants."

"When you look at George , you're like, 'It needs something,'" said one contributing editor. The January issue spent 21 of its total 100 pages on year-in-review, reader-survey or looking-ahead-to-next-year pieces. With the clock ticking toward the five years Hachette agreed to float the magazine, the question is whether Mr. Blow and Mr. Kennedy can continue to professionalize an environment that former staff members have dismissed as "like a high school yearbook"–although sources at the magazine said that Ms. Mitchell had pulled in the reins lately–and keep its subscribers renewing.

It seems that Hachette has determined it is time to meddle with George . Ms. Mitchell's departure was accompanied by several longtime employees on the advertising side getting the boot, too, including associate publisher Deborah Marcogliese and creative services director Negi Vafa. Launch publisher Elinore Carmody was replaced a year ago, and co-founder Michael Berman was shipped off to another part of Hachette in mid-1997. But, of course, Mr. Kennedy wasn't going anywhere: It's his magazine, and he gets a take of the profit–when, and if, it appears. Current and former staff members are careful to defend Mr. Kennedy: "I'm telling you, John has brilliant editor instincts," insisted contributing editor Lisa DePaulo. "He understands who the reader is."

Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Pecker had no comment on the change. Mr. Kennedy released a statement citing "creative differences" as the explanation for Ms. Mitchell's departure. And Mr. Blow told Off the Record that he is "excited about building on Biz's considerable success." Sources at George say that Mr. Blow is expected to make at least two hires at the understaffed weekly. One thing that's not going to change is the editor in chief, or, since a big-name outsider hasn't been hired, his role. "Would this magazine exist without John?" asked one insider. "Would anyone delude themselves that it would?"

Senior editor Hugo Lindgren is leaving New York magazine to rejoin his front-of-the-book pal, Ariel Kaminer. Ms. Kaminer recently left New York to edit a new front section in The New York Times Magazine , leaving Mr. Lindgren in charge of New York 's Gotham pages all by his lonesome. But Ms. Kaminer wasn't going to be able to handle the new section, set to be called "The Way We Live Now," all by herself. Enter Mr. Lindgren. "She suggested Hugo, and he was the right person for the job," said Times Magazine editor Adam Moss. The mix of columns and items will replace the current Sunday section in late February. "It's going to be grueling," Mr. Moss said. To edit, that is. As of Jan. 12, New York magazine editor in chief Caroline Miller had not decided who would take over Gotham.

While C-Span agreed to train its video cameras on Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's news conference, the powers that be over at The New York Times decreed that their reporters weren't allowed to cover it. The Times has struggled with how to cover the previously off-limits private lives of public figures all throughout this season of scandal. The decision to not cover the juicy, porn-funded public humiliation of supposedly hypocritical Republicans on the evening of Jan. 11 was made by executive editor Joseph Lelyveld.

"I plead guilty," Mr. Lelyveld told Off the Record on Jan. 12. "If a mainstream news organization broke a story about public figures and consensual sex, we wouldn't repeat it, either … The choice before us would be to do the reporting ourselves, or do nothing with it." Mr. Lelyveld added that The Times avoided repeating the stories about Troopergate and Gennifer Flowers for the same reason. "We don't want to be in the business of reporting sex," he said.

People managing editor Carol Wallace has gained a reputation for running Time Inc.'s most profitable magazine with an iron fist. Her tough management style has reportedly led to the defection over the last year of several longtime writers and editors to Us , Life and The Wall Street Journal . Well, chalk up another one. Just before New Year, Todd Gold, a 16-year veteran who was deputy Los Angeles bureau chief, announced he was leaving to produce Roseanne Barr's talk show. People is "not a place that nourishes creativity" anymore, he explained.

"I've known Roseanne for a long time," said Mr. Gold. Indeed, his cozy relationship with the kinds of people who populate the pages of the gabby weekly was detailed in a gushing Dec. 31 e-mail he cc'd to the entire staff. In it, he recalled "exclusives" with Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Calista Flockhart and others. He also extolled his "long friendship with Henry Winkler," remembered "drinking a $2,000 magnum of wine with Julio Iglesias and both of us passing out on his sofa midway through the interview, partying backstage at Live Aid with the Who, David Bowie and all the other rock stars," and making "lasting friendships with people like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner [and] Heather be thy name Locklear." Over all, Mr. Gold wrote, "I've had the definitive People magazine career."

Not that there weren't rough patches. When he decided to jump over to the other side and start a television production company, his bosses wouldn't let him "extend the brand" of People by producing TV shows based on the magazine, he said.

"It was supposed to be funny and over the top but at the same time asking this serious question: How can the world's largest and most successful magazine not have room for someone who helped define the magazine to grow?" Mr. Gold told Off the Record. Instead, he added bitterly, "they promote the inept."

Through a spokesman, Ms. Wallace said: "Everybody has their own way of saying goodbye."