According to a press release, the move is "in response to demand from its audience."

The release goes on to quote founder Samantha Moeller as saying, "Why produce a magazine, when our readers would rather access the same sassy original content online, and engage in the Missbehave community online? This is not the end of a media outlet, but rather a smart business decision on behalf of our readers."

Hey, the editors of U.S. News Weekly would probably agree.

Full release follows:

Is Tina Brown "like Schindler, in a skirt-suit"? That's what John Koblin calls her when it comes to bringing laid off writers into her Daily Beast. But what can they hope to be paid? Plus: January Groans: Mags' Lean Month Gets Downright Gaunt.

Can a 26-year-old consultant who took Columbia's Publishing Course and worked for a time at Little, Brown save publishing? Leon Neyfakh meets Eric Wolff, who says, "Truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for a big media company to own a book company unless it wants to be in that business... Corporations generally want growth stories, and there’s no growth in books.”

Plus: Missbehave's new editor... Superstar avatars... Murdoch the Magnificent.

“Should I accept everybody? Or should I only accept people who are my friends?” Ms. Arfin wondered recently in the conference room of her magazine’s parent company, Colossal Media, which occupies a buzzing, bilevel space just off Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. “I deleted my MySpace,” she continued. “I wanted to keep Facebook tight.”

Ms. Arfin, who had previously been editor at large at Missbehave, was tapped to edit the two-year-old, 110,000-circulation quarterly in August after founding editor Mary H. K. Choi left to become features editor at the hip-hop magazine Giant. Before that, Ms. Arfin wrote for Vice, including an article called “The Vice Guide to Finding Yourself,” which advised, “Telling your dad to fuck off and being prepared to fight him.” At 29, she’s mellowed, she said. “My taste has gotten more mainstream as I’ve gotten older. … I don’t have as much interest in being cool and seeking out what’s underground to impress my friends.”

How many Facebook “friends” does Ms. Arfin have anyway?

“Like eight hundred.”

Back in real life, she is close to It-girl–turned–premium-cable-Mormon Chloë Sevigny, with whom she recently attended the reopening party for the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami. Other guests included George Hamilton and some unfortunate swans. (“Surreal,” Ms. Arfin said.)

“Chlo,” as the editor calls her, appears on the cover of the first retooled Missbehave: her hair a nest of complicated braids, her pout slightly less fierce than it was when she staggered onto movie screens 13 years ago in Kids. Another of Ms. Arfin’s pals, Mark Jacobs—the former Paper writer, not the fashion designer—wrote the accompanying piece. Yet another friend, Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who once hired Ms. Arfin as an intern at his magazine, has taken Ms. Arfin’s old role as editor at large at Missbehave, where he’ll be contributing a column of ideas conceived while stoned.

“She’s incredibly confident,” Mr. McInnes said of his former protégé. “Maybe that’s why celebrities like hanging around her.” (Ms. Arfin has also worked as a fashion stylist, but found herself frustrated by the demands of personalities like Naomi Campbell, who apparently refused to put on her own socks.)

What about her management style? “I could never think of her as my boss,” Mr. McInnes said. “That would be weird.”

Ms. Arfin has long, dark hair with just a few strands of white at the roots; several tattoos (“nine or something” she said); and Clark Kent–style glasses. In a comfortable-looking brown sweater that fairly swallowed her slight frame, she called to mind the sort of smart-alecky girl Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci used to play in teen comedies: more kid sister than sex kitten, tough on the outside but willing to let her guard down in the final act.

“I would like to think I’m a superhero and can handle anything,” Ms. Arfin said of her cool-girl persona. “But I’m not. My feelings still get hurt. I’m very sensitive.” She laughed a little at this, but still conveyed the directness and clarity of someone who’s spent a lot of time talking to people—friends, therapists, group members, readers—about herself.

That may be because Ms. Arfin is a recovering drug user and alcoholic who chronicled her tumble into addiction in a 2007 book, Dear Diary. It told the story of a self-professed “high-maintenance Long Island Jew” who went from all-ages punk rock shows to getting high in the Lower East Side on 9/11 and wondering “what the big deal was” as the World Trade Center smoldered just blocks downtown.

Ms. Arfin sent copies of her book to “every single person in the world I admire,” she said, a list that included the comic actress and writer Amy Sedaris and director Judd Apatow, along with her old professors from Hampshire College.

“I didn’t get any response,” she said. “But it didn’t matter.”

After rehab at South Oaks and the Betty Ford Center, Ms. Arfin has been clean, she said, for six years. Her blog, Cafe Con Lesley, still documents frequent nightcrawling—Spike Lee, Jay-Z and John Stamos all make appearances—but now, she said, when things get weird, she goes home early. “I have friends who still do drugs, but if they’re going out and doing coke, I leave.”

After Ms. Arfin failed to catch publishers’ interest with two post–Dear Diary book proposals (one she described as “Our Bodies, Ourselves for punk rock kids”), she took some time off and traveled in India. Upon returning, she was offered the job at Missbehave, whose pages she hopes to make more “accessible,” less “urban.”

“I don’t wanna see the word ‘dope’ anymore. Things like that,” Ms. Arfin said. “I’m not into like Electroclash and boom boxes and bamboo earrings. I’ve never really been into that stuff.”

She proudly listed some of her current interests: the Dixie Chicks (“Oh my gosh, they’re so talented!”), Teen Vogue, Gossip Girl, VH1’s Celebrity Rehab and A&E’s Intervention, which she called “the funniest and saddest show.”

“I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures’ anymore,” she said, despite the fact that she once wrote “The Vice Guide to Guilty Pleasures.” “Moving onwards, I don’t want to feel guilty about the things that make me happy.”

And she doesn’t want Missbehave to be just about her friends, either, real or virtual. “I wanna get bigger covers. … Believe me, I don’t know how to do this. I’m, like, learning as I go along.”

mhaber@observer.com

Ms. Arfin, who probably still isn't over Rosie O'Donnell leaving The View, is described by Samantha Moeller, Missbehave's founder, as "without a doubt the quintessential ‘Missbehave’ chick: Chic, yet badass, she was the obvious choice."

In 2007, Ms. Arfin told The Huffington Post's A.J. Daulerio in an interview that she could think of no cooler magazine to work for than the Brooklyn-based Vice:

Perhaps Ms. Arfin will come to think that Missbehave is the magazine-world Pinky Tuscadero?

The quarterly magazine for the American-Appareled party-girl set shares its offices with the urban subculture guide for skaters and street kids, Mass Appeal magazine (which finances the unabashedly girly book on a skeletal budget). But it’s obvious which side of the room belongs to Ms. Choi and her partner, founding editor Samantha Moeller. Ms. Choi’s desk is mangled with piles of illustrated comics and Germaine Greer’s book The Whole Woman. Ms. Moeller’s desk is sprinkled with Hello Kitty products and wallpapered in old school bad-girl movie posters and cut-outs from gossip magazines. There’s a bubblegum pink cruiser bike in the hallway by the giant fish tank.

“If anyone reads Missbehave they’re thinking, these girls look like they’re having so much fun,” Ms. Choi said over brunch near her home in Carroll Gardens. “Everyone thinks that we’re so, like … running around town with $40,000 in credit debt, taking the morning-after pill like every day.”

It was just shy of two years ago, in the fall of 2005, when Ms. Choi, Ms. Moeller, 30 (who is the wife of Mass Appeal’s publisher, Adrian Moeller), and a few close friends­—photo editor Brooke Nipar and creative director Sally Thurer—decided that they needed a colloquial-voiced downtown fashion magazine that was distinctly anti-Cosmopolitan and pro-pro-girl. As Ms. Choi wrote in her editor’s letter in the first issue, published last August: “For seriously, when the four of us worked on this issue it was like that moment in The Craft where the witches got together for the first time and the Wiccan synergy goes bananas. Except none of us are Fairuza Balk since we’re all totally hot and have great teeth.”

Four issues later, Missbehave is sponsoring late-night parties at Brooklyn hot spot Studio B and will soon be on sale at Urban Outfitters and Hot Topic. The magazine just celebrated its one-year anniversary with BBQ and old school hip-hop jams from DJ Elle on The Delancey’s posh rooftop. The team is considering expanding into their own brand, with a scent, jewelry design and maybe even a clothing line on the horizon.

Missbehave’s pages drip with a polychromic kaleidoscope of fantastical style spreads and front-of-the-book stories about vibrators and DILF (Dad I’d Like to Fuck) hunting. Reading it is like surreptitiously savoring a jawbreaker and discovering wild new flavors you never thought you’d enjoy. Their cover girls are bad-girl songstresses like Lily Allen and model-cum-actresses like Mena Suvari. “She gives fuck-me eyes like no other,” Ms. Choi said.

In each issue, New York party promoters Oxy Cottontail, who organizes for the downtown “hopster” set, and Justine D., the DJ from rock ’n’ roll party institution Motherfucker, write their “Wanna Battle?” column offering contrasting advice on everything from boys to starting a business. Kelis, the female rapper whose 2003 single “Milkshake” brought all the boys to the yard, rants about topics ranging from feminism to name-calling.

“We get that we’re slutty a lot, and that’s so sexist derision,” Ms. Choi hissed. “And it’s so android-y to call us sluts.… The insults that actually hurt are the ones that say we’re anti-female.”

“We’re cool dorks,” Ms. Choi insisted. “We’re nerdly as hell. We all love fashion, like obsessed, all of us and always have been. It’s weird, it’s like, we’re unlikely popular people, you know?”

Hmm … Sounds kind of like another pro-girl mag, one that recently folded. Indeed, the Missbehave girls just might be likably popular enough to catch some Jane castaways.

No doubt that would suit the long-locked Ms. Choi. “We’re having a riot, you should come.”