Shane Smith, in the thick of it for VICE (Vice/HBO)

When Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice Media, pitched a television show to MTV in 2010, it seemed unimaginable that the company that came out of Vice magazine could establish itself as a respected informational source about, well, anything (other than how to decorate your heroin stash). And yet the network bit, and The Vice Guide to Everything ran for eight episodes, balancing ridiculous segments against heavier fare.

With its latest television program, VICE, which premieres next Friday, the media company is once again trying its hand at American television. Not just television. HBO. And this time, it’s not trading on its nihilistic reputation. Instead, it’s asking audiences to trust in its international-relations acumen. It wants to be taken seriously. Or at least as seriously as it takes itself.

“This is the grown-up, smarter, more erudite version of Vice,” Eddy Moretti, Vice Media’s executive creative director (and one of the producers of VICE), told Off the Record. In addition to being more earnest than its predecessor, Mr. Moretti said, this show is intensely researched.

Like Vanguard but shorter and with more cursing, VICE features three correspondents whose job it is to “expose the absurdities of the modern condition”: Mr. Smith, Dos & Don’ts book editor Thomas Morton and a former intern named Ryan Duffy.

For the show’s first season, the trio treks deep into dangerous international terrain, with a special focus on the Middle East, India and the North Korea/Thailand/China region. (We hear that if HBO gives them a second season, they’ll cover domestic terrors as well.)

“News from the Edge” is the slogan that HBO has given VICE, which makes one wonder what counts as “news” these days. VICE goes to dangerous locales and puts its correspondents in inhospitable situations, but it is less current-affairs journalism than novelty of access.

Indeed, immersion and danger are the points of the show, facts that the hosts allude to throughout the segments. “The world is changing,” Mr. Smith intones in the credit sequence. “No one knows where it’s going. But we’ll be there.” It’s the ultimate humblebrag.

Bill Maher, the only non-Vice executive producer of the show—the other two are Mr. Smith and another Vice Media co-founder, Suroosh Alvi—is a natural fit to back the program, as his own off-color TV show is to politics what the Vice brand is to traditional reporting. Fareed Zakaria, who is a consultant on VICE, is a much stranger bedfellow. The fact that a CNN host would be involved in Shane Smith’s project suggests the media company is making a prime-time play for legitimacy with VICE.

Mr. Moretti stopped just short of calling VICE a “news” program—but that may be semantic. “I think it’s a documentary show,” said Mr. Moretti. “News, to me, is everything that happened in a day, from the weather to the president visiting Israel to, you know, a cat in a tree.”

It’s a potato/potahto situation: it’s not news in the timely sense, and yet meeting Taliban leaders is newsworthy. And in recent months, the media company has gotten used to finding itself in the news cycle.

With stunts like sending Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea (where “The Worm” became the first American to meet Kim Jong-un) and the accidental leaking of John McAfee’s whereabouts in Guatemala through a photographer’s metadata, Vice Media has become a newsmaker—if not a newsbreaker.

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un in North Korea (Vice/HBO)

Still, VICE is having some trouble finding where it fits on the spectrum. It seems as though the show wants to stay true to its roots, in some ways, but also wants to be taken seriously; a hard line to toe, especially when your program is composed of two rushed 15-minute segments about “showing some of the scariest, weirdest and most absurd customs and practices known to humanity,” as Mr. Smith has referred to it.

That tongue-in-cheek tone is difficult to maintain when dealing with VICE's surprisingly serious subject matter: child bombers of the Taliban; India and Pakistan’s fights with Kashmir; political unrest in the Philippines. Half of each episode is the correspondents telling the audience how “fucked” the people in a particular region are, with interstitial shots of shockingly explicit footage from bombings, shootings and massacres. It’s not exactly “fun TV.”

In fact, several sources questioned whether HBO has gotten what it bargained for with VICE. They suggested that HBO was hesitant to work with the company—president of HBO Entertainment Sue Naegle in particular—but agreed on the condition that the program would deliver a scoop about Mitt Romney’s polygamist family in Mexico during the election cycle. (That particular piece ended up online, but the show proceeded anyway.) Mr. Moretti denied the existence of such a condition.

Others said HBO was expecting more of the old Vice.

“[HBO] actually wanted a hate-Brooklyn, pissing on themselves [show],” said one source close to the situation, who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. “And then they got all this serious shit.”

“HBO was shocked by that,” our tipster continued. “But Vice likes to do really serious stuff now.” Still, the source floated the possibility that the network was actually impressed: “Maybe HBO was shocked in a good way.”

As Mr. Moretti tells it, there was no resistance from the premium channel.

“It was just kind of a meeting of the minds. It was a wonderful process,” he said. “A lot of people can experience a traumatic pitch process, but with HBO, we just felt like these people knew us, understood us. They have a passion for news and documentary.”

To be fair to Vice, it’s not your older brother’s Canadian grime-core magazine anymore. (Hell, it’s barely a magazine anymore.) Vice Media has become a huge digital content creator, especially with Vice.com, which hosts 60-plus video channels. According to a spokesperson, 80 to 90 percent of what Vice Media produces today is online video.

In 2011 alone, Vice Media made $110 million on these video series, from pre-roll ads to YouTube partnerships. The programs range from the silly to the somber.

The stern of Vice’s skateboards-and-boobs ship began to turn in 2007. That was when Mr. Moretti and Mr. Alvi premiered their documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, about an Iraqi heavy-metal band, Acrassicauda. The video struck all the right notes: it had the hardcore, DIY underground music scene that already fit with Vice’s original conception as a punk magazine, but it was also covering a reality about the war-torn country from a unique perspective. When the accolades began pouring in for the documentary, Vice transitioned—overnight, it seemed—from a hipster outfit to an international “news” presence. The HBO show appears to be the natural culmination of this Vice 2.0.

“The secret of Vice was to stick to the core template I created. Stupid in a smart way, smart in a stupid way. Never be serious,” said Gavin McInnes, a founder and former employee of Vice Media, who left the company in 2008 following a very public dispute after Viacom was brought in. (Viacom maintained a partnership with Vice’s online video content from 2007 to 2009, when it was VBS.TV.) “I think they are trying to do serious journalism now.”

In a 2007 interview with Wired, on the occasion of the launch of VBS.TV, Mr. Alvi said, “Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since Day One with the magazine, we never believed in that.”

In fact, when VBS.TV first launched that year, its motto was: “Rescuing you from television’s deathlike grip.”

Oh, the irony.

“I think it’s a maturation of our natural form of documentary storytelling,” Mr. Moretti said of the show. “A maturation of the Vice brand, in a way. It’s consistently more serious, and the stories are told with a lot of diligence.”

When asked if this evolution represented Vice’s bildungsroman, Mr. Moretti answered with a laugh: “Totally. Actually, it’s my personal bildungsroman.”

Like a lot of things about Vice, though, we couldn’t tell if the executive was being totally serious. Which might be a problem when it comes time to teach Americans about the Pakistani and Indian factions currently tearing apart the region of Kashmir.

In the meantime, we’ll take Vice’s new conscientious-citizens-of-the-world shtick with a grain of salt. Or, if they can spare it, a bump of blow.

Additional reporting by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke

Hanna Rosin

“Last night we did a version of this where we walked down the aisle!” said Atlantic senior editor Hanna Rosin at the beginning of a debate last Wednesday at the Maritime Hotel, on occasion of the publication of her book, The End of Men. “It was like our wedding!”

She had just come onstage along with an unlikely interlocutor: her husband David Plotz, the editor of Slate. The couple were conducting a road show of sorts to debate whether or not the male gender was less nimble in the current economy, they appeared together in Washington the night before and were scheduled to appear on Today together on Thursday. The sell—woman declares male gender dead (or, at least, her book jacket does), and here’s her loving husband!—was irresistible, and the pair played it up at the Maritime reading. Mr. Plotz referred to himself, early in the evening, as “Mr. Rosin,” and instructed his debate partner, “You need to stay on mic, sweetie. Just hold it! It’s very simple.”

For her part, Ms. Rosin bristled good-naturedly at a tough question, saying “It’s weird! Because you’re my husband! And you’re Charlie Rose-ing me!”

Not every viewer was entranced, however. We noticed New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren, who excerpted The End of Men for a recent, characteristically splashy cover spread in his publication. The editor spent much of the speech whispering loudly to one male and one female friend.

“Do you like my boots?” Mr. Lindgren asked his male friend, pulling up the leg of his trousers to peacock.

“Yeah! Do you like mine?” asked his male friend, as Ms. Rosin spoke.

The debate was won by Ms. Rosin, but by then Mr. Lindgren was already gone.

Mandy Stadtmiller (Patrick McMullan)

On August 6, Mandy Stadtmiller started as a deputy editor at Jane Pratt’s women’s-interest site xoJane—the date was marked “Job Starts” in her iCal—but that wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to her that day. XoJane had just lost one of its main attractions in beauty bloggger trainwreck Cat Marnell, but happily Ms. Stadtmiller was able to generate considerable attention of her own. In the morning, she published a piece entitled “I Inspired a ‘Bad’ Version of Myself on Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.” The SEO-enabled headline was no joke; the piece detailed Ms. Stadtmiller’s brief romantic relationship with Mr. Sorkin. The movie and television writer had written into the show a hard-charging gossip reporter character he told Ms. Stadtmiller he was calling “Bad Mandy.”

The emails between the pair are included in the piece—Ms. Stadtmiller published screenshots. “It was a choice that changed that relationship forever,” she told Off the Record over calamari and Diet Cokes at a steakhouse near xoJane’s NoMad offices. “And it was the right choice to make ... I obviously recognized that he’s not going to like it. But I chose to crucify myself and paint him as kindly as possible.”

“I heard from him two times after the piece,” she went on. “The first time, he was very nice. The second time, he was very pissed.”

The former New York Post scribe knows how to play a story for all it’s worth—especially when it’s about her own experience. She published stories at the tabloid about a night with America’s first legal male prostitute and undergoing the New York Jets cheerleaders’ training regimen, as well as a dating column, “About Last Night” (“We kiss a little, but it’s the holding that sends shivers down my spine.”).

This first-person, self-as-news approach is perfect for xoJane: the site’s exclusives are derived from the fact that they happened to the staff. With her first-day story of ending up on the small screen thanks to an Oscar-winning cad of an ex, Ms. Stadtmiller fit in immediately; she’s since written about masturbating to Paul Ryan and worrying that all her friendships are “transactional.”

Ms. Stadtmiller’s tenure at the Post began in 2005 and ended this February, when the writer chose to leave and announced plans to publish a roman á clef, entitled News Whore, which she works on over the weekends. She insisted that she will not burn any bridges—“I do not enjoy ruining lives ... If I’m writing about doing a line of blow at my desk with a Fox News reporter, not naming him is a classier way to do it!” Even the title, News Whore, isn’t meant to be taken at face value. “I’m positioning it the way the Post would position it. ‘Slutty, Crazy Girl Tells All!’”

The Post was ultimately not for her, due to its reliance on the sort of easily digested narrative that makes the morning commute pass quickly. “It’s this black-white, hero-villain, News Corp. storyline.” Those looking for dirt on Rupert Murdoch may be disappointed: Ms. Stadtmiller never tapped a phone or anything of the sort. The misdeeds here are subtler. “Did I feel like I had to crucify people just to have an angle? I did.” (On that note, she counts The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm among her favorite books.)

As a character in the xoJane cast, Ms. Stadtmiller may soon get the chance to appear on television; Ms. Pratt is mulling the possibility of an xoJane reality show. The editor published a screenshot of her inbox depicting an email from an executive assistant with the truncated headline “Context for Tomorrow’s Reality Sh ...”

“There’s been a lot of different interest, explained Ms. Stadtmiller, “and there’s a likelihood that it’ll happen. For Jane, if it was done the right way, it’s clear that it would make a fun reality show. It’s in progress, and it’s been fun to come on board with that in the works.”

As Jane Pratt told Buzzfeed’s Amy Odell, she’d been taking meetings and saw her newsroom as a good fit. “In hiring, I did feel like I was casting a soap opera or reality show.”

Ms. Stadtmiller, who read Ms. Pratt’s Sassy as a young woman, showed us a text on her own phone. It was from a childhood friend from San Diego, about working with the provocative editor: “I can’t believe you are living our dream.”

Marc Ambinder.

Marc Ambinder needed a break. He’d been productive, having written a book about the Joint Special Operations Command and broken new ground in his reporting on the death of Osama bin Laden, as well as covering the Obama era for The Atlantic. Not to mention serving as National Journal’s White House correspondent. That was his last gig before moving out of D.C. His last byline on its website came in January of this year, and rather than waiting until after the election for a restorative vacation, Mr. Ambinder departed for the West Coast, with his husband, a Mattel executive, in tow.

“After 11 years living in Washington, D.C., part of me is just sick of this swamp,” Mr. Ambinder wrote in GQ. Good-bye to all that humidity!

Out in Los Angeles (dry heat), Mr. Ambinder took meetings with the goal of producing a drama or reality series based on issues of interest to him, particularly national security. He declined to go into many specifics, given the drawn-out and often random process of television production, but his Twitter bio is guardedly optimistic: “Sort-of TV producer.”

“At some point in everyone’s life, you owe yourself the chance to do what you want for a while,” he told Off the Record. He was also writing a bit for GQ and working on a book deal, but came to miss the news cycle. “It’s hard to completely step away from it. You get addicted to the arousal of it!” Mr. Ambinder noted.

Along came The Week, which this week announced its hiring of Mr. Ambinder as editor at large and blogger for The Compass, a one-man show akin to Andrew Sullivan’s vertical at The Daily Beast or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s at The Atlantic.

The blog isn’t going to be updated exhaustively, though. “A bunch of other publications had come to me after I left National Journal and asked me to join full time,” said Mr. Ambinder, “and they put together fairly attractive financial packages. The problem was, it would degrade my capacity to do the things I’m out here to do. It sounds weird for me to say this, but I’m working on developing TV shows based on long-form subjects I’ve already written. The development process is [an] endless series of meetings. There will be days when my mind and attention needs to be occupied by those.”

But even thoughtful blogging—the site’s first two days featured three posts, all somewhere between long-for-the-Internet and #longreads—can tend to plunge one into a frivolous, all-consuming news cycle. Mr. Ambinder, who cites Matt Yglesias (Slate), David Frum (The Daily Beast) and Ezra Klein (The Washington Post) as writers he admires, doesn’t seem concerned, having escaped the Beltway echo chamber. “After the 2008 election, it was hard to imagine covering anything else as exciting as that,” he said. “Covering Washington for the next four years and the toxicity of virtually everything in Washington kind of got to me. Maybe I had a fight-or-flight response on an existential level. I kind of got tired of just covering ... politics!

“I couldn’t find myself writing about what Rush Limbaugh said today ... I did not want to cover the 2012 campaign as a daily journalist. I didn’t have the intestinal fortitude.”

At The Week, though, he’ll be able to inject voice, opinion and even doubt into his columns, rather than the authority of a dispassionate correspondent. “You’re kind of telling the story but letting the reader know you’re not, and can never be, 100 percent sure of yourself and what you’re saying. It’s kind of a good trait in someone who’s writing frequently. The more you know, the more you really don’t know."

He added, “There’s a corollary there with people in Los Angeles, where, they say, nobody knows anything.”

Ms. Kardashian came and left quickly, and Ms. Smith talked briefly with the club's owner about its alleged restrictions against short women, mentioned in a Page Six item the day before. Ms. Smith is about 5 feet tall.

After a brief stop at another event nearby, Ms. Smith made her way to the Gansevoort Park Avenue, where Chris Brown was at a party for a new line of Swatch watches. She arrived late--and was rebuffed at the door. 

"She just said, 'Come on, can you let us in?' She didn't say, 'I'm with Page Six," according to Alan Rish, a publicist who was out with her that night.

What Mr. Rish didn't know — and what nobody at the Gansevoort is going to let that doorman soon forget — is that a few hours earlier, Ms. Smith was let in on the biggest scoop of her career: She learned she would be taking over Page Six, the Post's gossip flagship, from Richard Johnson, its longtime patriarch.

HOW'S SHE DOING? > Check out the Scandal Report: Our Weekly Guide to the Town's Top Gossips. 

The ascension of a relatively unknown Fleet Street vet to one of Manhattan's loftiest social perches had the makings of a vintage Page Six item--the sexy outsider, the mysterious future for her predecessor, and all of it set against the prospect of a renewed gossip war between the Post and the Daily News, which has been staffing up.

Immediately, a few questions come to mind: How could Ms. Smith know the scene when she arrived at the Post a little more than a year ago? Does her tenure at a British tabloid mean the sensibilities of the beloved Post column will change? How did the Post land her in the first place?

Ms. Smith isn't saying. Even though she makes her living telling other people's secrets, she wouldn't talk about her new gig, reinforcing a feeling even among her friends that she's something of a mystery.

"That's what's awesome about Emily," said Rob Shuter, who writes a gossip column for the Web site Popeater and also saw her out last Wednesday. "She's silent." Mr. Shuter called Mr. Johnson the next day to ask if the news was true. How could Ms. Smith have kept the news a secret? "She's a tomb," Mr. Johnson told him.

 "She's like 5 foot tall and attractive and blonde, but she does pack a big punch. She is very calm. She doesn't show her cards," said Life & Style editor Dan Wakeford, who also saw Ms. Smith out that night and knows her from their days working together on The Sun in London. "She's not someone who would show her cards. She would take a secret to the grave."

"She's the female version of James Bond, the smiling assassin," said Piers Morgan, soon to be the new Larry King.

Former Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, who described himself, at 6-foot-3, as "large and loudish," said he was always envious of Ms. Smith's size. "She has that quality that's kind of lethal in a gossip columnist, which is seeming very harmless. She's diminutive and very charming and puts people at ease," he said. He lowered his voice into a quiet rasp: "And then she goes in for the kill."

Working for the Husband-Beater

Ms. Smith went to work on the news desk of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun when she was 21 after a year working on her hometown paper in Shropshire. She lived with her family in Oman and Abu Dhabi, where her father was a corporate accountant, until she was seven. She attended university at Liverpool.

She was recognized immediately for her reporting chops on the news desk and moved onto the TV beat. Soon after, she began working as a deputy on the newspaper's showbiz column, Bizarre. "The best way to describe it might be that she was quietly efficient," said a staffer at The Sun who shared bylines with Ms. Smith. He described her as friendly with her colleagues, but not particularly outgoing. "If you show any weakness, you'd just be torn to pieces. That's just the way it is in our office," he said. "If you don't deliver the goods, you're out. Simple as that."

Ms. Smith showed enormous potential at The Sun and the Bizarre column was a prized platform. It is where Andy Coulson, Victoria Newton and Martin Dunn, who resigned in the spring as the editor of the Daily News, all made names for themselves. "It's always been used by Rupert Murdoch as a training ground," said Mr. Morgan, who ran the column in the late '80s and early '90s. "If you look at the list of people who edited that column, you'll see how important it is to Rupert and News International." 

While Ms. Smith was working on Bizarre, Mr. Morgan competed against her as editor of The Daily Mirror. "She was very irritating because she got lots of stories," he said.

RELATED > 10 of Page Six's Best Items Since 2007

After two years as a deputy working on Bizarre,  Sun editor Rebekah Wade gave Ms. Smith a new television column, as part of a larger effort to expand celebrity coverage.

In 2005, Ms. Wade tapped Ms. Smith to move to the States to be The Sun's U.S. editor. (Ms. Wade spent a night in prison later that year for assaulting her then-husband, a former BBC soap opera star. She has remarried under the name Rebekah Brooks, and is now the CEO of Mr. Murdoch's News International.)

"At The Sun, the U.S. editor is seen as a prized position," said Life & Style editor Dan Wakeford. "Murdoch and the editors of The Sun only send the stars out there."

For the next four years, Ms. Smith covered all major news in America for The Sun. She worked nonstop, waking up early to talk to her British editors and staying up late to shore up her American sources. "She would be getting up at 5 in the morning and staying out until 3 in the morning every night," said a friend who worked with her. "She can be a little bit robotic," the friend added.

Friends tell stories about her calling from a Hummer while driving into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and living out of a car because there was no place to stay. Others tell stories about someone who barely sleeps and puts her career before anything else. "If she was asked by a boss on her anniversary to cover a story, I know she would. That's newspaper training--that always comes first," said one friend.

While at The Sun, Ms. Smith broke news that Paul Burrell, Princess Diana's butler, had perjured himself during an inquest in London. She also broke the news of Kelsey Grammer's secret affair and Paul McCartney's new girlfriend, and covered the Virginia Tech shootings for The Sun.

Ms. Smith remains particularly close with her father and her sister, who works in marketing for The Guardian in London. She lives with her boyfriend on the Upper West Side in the 70s.

In March of 2009, The Sun called Ms. Smith back to London. She had three months to close up shop in America and return home. "Both of us worked tirelessly never to go back," said Kimberly Bernhardt, a longtime friend of Ms. Smith's who now lives in Chicago with her family and does publicity for large companies. (Ms. Smith and Ms. Bernhardt moved to New York from London around the same time, and helped each other navigate the city's dating scene and American holidays. For Halloween her first year, Ms. Smith dressed up as a pirate.)

"I know that The Sun probably wanted her to return at times. She wanted to stay. She was very, very passionate about the city."

Ms. Smith used the three months to find another job stateside. Mr. Wakeford hired her as East Coast news director at Life & Style in June, partly to help her stay in America.

During her short tenure at the German-owned celebrity glossy, Ms. Smith broke news and left her mark on the title. Life & Style was the first magazine to suggest that Michael Jackson could have been murdered, a notion that remains under dispute.

Then, after barely three months at the magazine, Ms. Smith left for Page Six. (Her former boss wasn't entirely thrilled by the move. When Mr. Wakeford got married over the summer, Ms. Smith was invited to the reception but not the ceremony.)

The Daily News Gears Up

At Page Six, in August 2009, Ms. Smith replaced Paula Froelich, who left to focus on book writing. "To be honest with you, I didn't want to be there," Ms. Froelich told The Observer on Tuesday, talking on her cell phone while shopping for a sweater on the Upper East Side. "You know what? This is her dream job and frankly I think it's amazing because Page Six deserves to have somebody who wants to go in there every day and who loves it."

Ms. Froelich had eaten dinner with Ms. Smith in Soho the previous night. Did she have any idea what Ms. Smith had planned for the column? "No idea," said Ms. Froelich, who recently returned from a trip to Kenya. "Honestly, I was so jet-lagged last night." (She got distracted shopping. "Oh my God, somebody made a pillow out of feathers. A pillow out of decorative feathers!")

"I hope it changes," Ms. Froelich said, turning her attention back to Page Six. "Nothing is static. If you don't change, you're a rock, and rocks are boring. Everything needs new blood. Everything needs to be changed every now and again. And, you know what, I think it's great."

Chris Wilson, who left Page Six in 2006, also thinks Ms. Smith is going to do well in her new role. He worked with Ms. Smith in April when he came back to pick up a week of freelance work on the news desk at the Post. "On my first day back, she got this great scoop on Tiki Barber cheating on his pregnant wife with this hot young chippy," said Mr. Wilson. "It turned out to be the wood the next day, and we shared a byline on it."

He was impressed by Ms. Smith's ability to turn a small tip into a front-page story. "It was the difference between what could have been a tantalizing but unappealing blind item and a wood that rattled the whole media world," he said.

That night Stephen Colbert held up the Post with the "Sneaky Tiki" headline splashed across the cover. "I'd like to start out tonight, as I do on many nights, by saying bravo to the New York Post for being watchdog of our nation's morality," Mr. Colbert said on his show. Mr. Wilson said that, for gossip items, it doesn't get any better than that.

"If you can handle the sort of competitive maelstrom and clusterfuck that is Fleet Street," Mr. Wilson added, "you're gonna be just fine taking on the Daily News."

And that, in fact, may be Ms. Smith's most pressing initial challenge. Sensing a certain ennui on the part of Mr. Johnson, the Daily News has recently staffed up its Page Six rival, Gatecrasher. Frank DiGiacomo, a former Observer writer, is editing the pages, along with a new staffer.

The sense among Manhattan media types is that Page Six may now be vulnerable, though years of entrenched reading habits will make the column particularly hard to unseat.

Like his new rival, Mr. DiGiacomo declined comment.

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

RELATED > 10 of Page Six's Best Items Since 2007

In 2008, a weekly section dedicated to reportage and art and book reviews began as an insert called The Review in an English-language newspaper, The National. Though you might not have seen or heard of it, freelance assignments went out to some of New York's finest. Book reviews were 1,600 words. Cover stories were 5,000 words. Far-flung travel assignments were assigned. It was all printed on a broadsheet! It felt like old times.

More significantly, the paper gave freelancers anywhere from 75 cents to $1 per word. Spend a night banging out a book review, spend a day or two going back and forth with edits and violà!--a check (or even a wire transfer) for $1,200. During a period when it was impossible to find an assignment--let alone getting someone to actually hand you a paycheck--this was a boon for a certain class of New Yorker.

The catcher in the rye was a former New Yorker fact-checker named Jonathan Shainin. Mr. Shainin, the editor of The Review, assigned pieces and handed out assignments to heavyweights like George Packer, David Samuels and Steve Coll.

"It was like back being in 2002 or 2003 or something," said Spencer Ackerman, a reporter for Wired.com, who was one of many freelancers who contributed to the section. "In this age of perpetual collapse, all of a sudden there was an editor with resources who told you to think big and go long."

But like all things, times change. Mr. Shainin, 32, left the paper in late September and, this past weekend, moved out of Abu Dhabi. He left, in part, because the section he brought to life began to feel like something different. Freelance rates got cut back; story lengths changed as the paper transitioned from a broadsheet to a tabloid; ambitious pieces had to be scaled back in order to give way to more--magazine editors, take cover!--"points of entry."

In about two and a half years, Mr. Shainin's Review was a perfect illustration of what's happened to the American print press in the past couple of decades--lofty ambitions took a back seat to economic reality. 

The story begins in 2007, when Mr. Shainin was a fact-checker at The New Yorker and received an out-of-the-blue email that asked if he might be interested in moving to Abu Dhabi and becoming a culture editor for a new newspaper. The paper was technically funded by the Abu Dhabi Media Company, which received its funding from the Abu Dhabi government. Mr. Shainin was on the fence. One night, while he was fact-checking a piece with New Yorker editor David Remnick, he asked the onetime Moscow correspondent for his advice.

"He was like, 'Oh yeah, do it,'" remembered Mr. Shainin. "'You'd be crazy not to do this. You're young, not married, go out and travel the world.'"

So Mr. Shainin took his "blind leap" and then went and had a heck of a time.

"If you're a young person and you're trying to be an editor rather than a writer, it's hard to get a break," said Mr. Shainin, who worked for Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books before he went to The New Yorker. "If you're not at an organization where you can work your way up, it's hard to get someone to take a chance on you as an editor."

He had a nice salary and a freelance budget. The Abu Dhabi Media Company--bankrolled by the government--said they didn't have to worry about being profitable for five years. The goal was to make it a world-class paper. What better way than to go out and find those big writers? And then it became addictive. Once one name came, another would follow. He got big-name writers like Mr. Packer, Mr. Coll, Howard French, Caleb Crain and others.

And his writers adored him.

"He'd nearly always call me at 4 a.m. AD time--not kidding--and be fresh and lucid and helpful. I joked with him that his memoir should be called 'The Dialectic at 4 AM,'" emailed Matthew Price, a freelancer who used to work at Lingua Franca, and who wrote for the section.

David Samuels recalled that after he filed a 6,000-word piece about the new Yankee Stadium to Mr. Shainin, he received a memo that was just about as long as his piece. Like any writer, Mr. Samuels was horrified when he saw it, but then went through it line-by-line and found out that it was actually insightful.

"That was something that used to be commonplace with editors at magazines," said Mr. Samuels. "In New York, there was an ethos of this kind of fine-tuned editorial attention. At some point in the '90s, this other ethos took over--that editors were kings and writers were these interchangeable parts."

"Jonathan is old school," he continued.

Mr. Ackerman, the Wired.com reporter, said he was thrilled that Mr. Shainin inspired him to "be panoramic and more analytical" with his pieces.

"My interests tend to be somewhat academic, and I just marveled that I could write about serious history books in a journalistic format, at length, and get paid quite handsomely for my efforts," said Mr. Price.

Ah, yes, the money!

"The money, of course, was very welcome, both for the surprised, grateful delight occasioned by receipt of payment ('Wait. They're paying me how much?') and for the stability regular, good money brings into the life of a ground-scratching book reviewer like me," emailed Sam Munson, a novelist and critic who wrote about a dozen pieces, and will continue to freelance there. "I wish I had more to say, or could say the preceding more eloquently, but why embroider? It was fucking awesome."

"Magazines that I looked to for a fat paycheck or easy work went out of business," said Mr. Samuels. "There was a general sense that the business was collapsing and no one really wanted to hear about that story which was going to take me to Siberia for five months. I was very grateful to Jonathan for paying me a nice amount of money to spend the summer sitting in the $5 seats at Yankee Stadium, which is where I would have spent my summer anyway."

The Yankee Stadium piece was published before the World Series, and actually had a newsy hook--it got lots of pickup.

BUT LIKE ALL these stories, it wouldn't last. Though the Abu Dhabi Media Company said it could wait five years to turn a profit, the timeline accelerated. Six months ago, the paper became a tabloid, and Review cover stories went from 5,000 words to 2,500 words; freelancers went from a rate of 75 cents to 50 cents; there were fewer assignments handed out and more and more copy was written in-house; expenses were basically cut away.

Mr. Shainin resigned earlier this summer, and moved to India on Monday.

"I think that there was a merging of two streams of thought," he said. "On the one hand, I was reaching my expiration date and working myself to death. And on the other hand, it started to seem as if it was going to be difficult to continue to make it better."

His girlfriend, who moved with him from New York to Abu Dhabi, wanted to move to India, so now Mr. Shainin is taking a senior editor job at a new magazine there called Caravan.

And though the paper still runs, and the section still functions, it's a slighter version of what it once was during that brief period when Mr. Shainin learned how to edit and New York writers found refuge.

"Jonathan did the thing that is the dream of any kid editor--start a magazine and just publish good stuff," said Mr. Samuels. "And it was terrific! I'm sad that this oil sheik isn't going to pay for it anymore."

jkoblin@observer.com

When Bill Keller announced that Gerry Marzorati's time as editor of The Times Magazine was finished--at a time when many former and current staffers were feeling embittered about the state of the magazine--he said a replacement would be named by the end of August.

Well, it's now the end of September, and Mr. Marzorati's lame-duck term is ripening. Trying to discern a short list of candidates is a wild guessing game even within the Times Building.

Here is what we do know: Daniel Zalewski, the features editor of The New Yorker, who edits big names like Jane Mayer, George Packer and Lawrence Wright, was recently offered the job and turned it down. Mr. Zalewski, a former story editor at The Times Magazine, was seen as the front-runner all summer long, and his candidacy was an open secret within The New Yorker offices. After going through the interview process, The Times said it was his job if he wanted it, and that's when Mr. Zalewski walked away. In turn, sources said, Mr. Zalewski, has gotten some perks from The New Yorker, including a David Remnick-like deal that will allow him to write more for the magazine. Plus, some assistant help! He declined to comment. 

The prospect of Mr. Zalewski's hiring offered delicious potential: A real-life weekly magazine war raging in New York and a genuine old-fashioned rivalry between the two weeklies. Mr. Zalewski wouldn't have the same resources at his disposal as he does with Condé Nast, but his writers are devoted to him, and it wouldn't have been a surprise to see some of them defect.

RELATED > SEE THE WINNERS OF ASME'S BEST MAGAZINE COVER COMPETITION

And now that The Times has lost out on its chance with Mr. Zalewski, where does it go from here? One high-ranking source tells us that even though Mr. Keller wanted to give a healthy look to outside candidates, it seems more and more likely that The Times is going to find an editor from within 620 Eighth Avenue. Names we keep hearing: Business columnist Joe Nocera, Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus and editorial deputy editor David Shipley. If The Times does hire within, the paper won't exactly match the wow factor when it managed to poach Sally Singer from Vogue for the T Magazine job.

Asked about the status of the search, Mr. Keller would only say in an email, "We're pretty close."

Speaking of the Times magazines, Ms. Singer is pulling together her first issue at T. Sources tell us that Mick Jagger will be Ms. Singer's first cover, in December, and that photographer Max Vadukul will do the shoot. Times sources also said that Ms. Singer has assigned a piece on autism. With a surprising cover choice like Mick Jagger, and autism pieces in the magazine, isn't Ms. Singer's T beginning to look a little like ... The Times Magazine?

With a new editor presumably a couple months away from really getting started at The Times Magazine, Ms. Singer is clearly taking the Stefano Tonchi ad-friendly version of T in a slightly different direction, and encroaching on the weekly magazine's turf. Ms. Singer, who is already a hit with the masthead and execs at the company, was feted this weekend by Arthur Sulzberger and Times Company CEO Janet Robinson at Palazzo Marino across from La Scala in a party in Milan. Fancy!

Ms. Singer, emailing from Paris, said, "I don't really feel comfortable discussing the holiday issue because it's still being put together and all sorts of things could happen."

And what's happening with Newsweek?

The Daily Beast and Newsweek merger rumors are out there, and Sidney Harman and Barry Diller are talking seriously. The question is whether they'll pull the trigger. The deal obviously makes the most sense for Mr. Harman since Tina Brown's stature will suspend all the Newsweek obituaries. It also allows Mr. Diller not to worry that Ms. Brown will get bored and fly the coop (as she usually does), and would give him a teammate in working with the Daily Beast Web site.

It will be interesting to see how Ms. Brown works with Representative Jane Harman, if a deal came to pass, but it's a deal Mr. Harman should jump at.

jkoblin@observer.com

RELATED > SEE THE WINNERS OF ASME'S BEST MAGAZINE COVER COMPETITION

In October 2007, Paul Steiger told The Observer that he wanted to use a Wall Street Journal pay model to recruit staffers to his fledgling nonprofit, ProPublica.

"I'm prepared to spend $200,000 on the exact right person, but if the exact right person isn't there, then I'll get three people at $60,000," he said.

Since then Mr. Steiger has found at least a half a dozen people that fit the "exact right person" bill.

ProPublica's Form 990, as first reported by FishbowlNY, gives a clear look at how its staffers are well compensated. So let's investigate the investigators! Eight employees made more than $160,000, topped by Mr. Steiger, who brought in $571,687, plus an additional $13,000 in compensation. (Life is definitely good for Mr. Steiger-he reportedly made up to $5 million when he left The Journal in 2007.) Other big wage-earners include managing editor Stephen Engelberg ($343,463) and the best paid reporter, former Washington Post writer Dafna Lizner ($205,445, or, if you examine her 17,000 or so words, roughly $12 per word in 2009).

On the one hand, ProPublica has the totally defensible position of promoting investigative pieces at a time when no one invests in them. One of their pieces-in collaboration with The Times Magazine-won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award. (If you click on their Web site, there are many other awards and nominations; Mr. Steiger has always been award-happy). Also, they're funded by Herbert and Marion Sandler (who gave an additional $4.5 million in 2009), so bless them for that.

But on the other hand: They make whaaaaaaaat? The journalism business has been rough recently, which makes Mr. Steiger's salary seem particularly ...

"Obscene," tweeted Tunku Varadarajan, a former Journal staffer who is now an editor at large at the Daily Beast. In another tweet, he nicknamed the news outfit "ProSteiger."

So what's the deal? Mr. Steiger didn't return our calls. Instead, Richard Tofel, former assistant publisher at The Journal and current general manager of ProPublica, spoke to us. 

"We were not the New York Yankees of journalism," said Mr. Tofel, who made $320,978 plus another $21,392 in compensation.

"We've said from the very beginning of this, that we were going to pay market salaries to people for their work, and so we do," he continued.

Brand-new editor at large Lynn Hirschberg and creative director Jody Quon were also there. So off to page 204 we go, with a short item written by Sports Illustrated's Jon Wertheim, accompanied by a dark, sultry photo of the 25-year-old American tennis player John Isner (pronounced Is-Ner).

"This is something on Eyes-ner," Mr. Tonchi said.

"Tennis player," whispered Ms. Hirschberg, instructively, to the group of reporters.

"The marathon man ..." continued Mr. Tonchi.

"Guy was in the longest match ever," whispered Ms. Hirschberg.

"It's a little taste-preview of what will be in the U.S. Open and the great hope of American tennis!" he concluded.

The cover features eight relatively unknown American actresses, including Emma Roberts, Zoe Kravitz and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. They are supposed to be the next big things!

Mr. Tonchi went with these gals instead of, say, Julia Roberts (Elle's September cover girl).

Once his presentation — and it was fast — was over, we asked him to explain the choice.  

"The happy marriage is when you and the celebrity are in the cover to promote the magazine, to promote the content of the magazine and to represent the magazine somehow," he said. "When the celebrity is on the cover of the magazine to promote the piece or her movie, I think the magazine is a loser."

And what separates W from the rest of the field?

"We have a different readership — I think there is space out there that is a little bit edgier than, say, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, so on, because we have a smaller circulation. We can take risks that they cannot do because they have to answer to a very demanding newsstand."

And what about that WSJ. glossy magazine and Rupert Murdoch? Are they competition?

"He has the resources to do it, but he should try to reach the people that he doesn't have already," said Mr. Tonchi. "They have been doing a magazine for a very boring readership. I was very surprised when they talked about it like a vanity project, but there was not a lot of vanity."

Zing!

At the luncheon, there was some talk about the magazine's Web site and iPads and iPhones. W will launch a family of apps in the spring.

What does Mr. Tonchi's staff think?

"I'm very eager to embrace that part of the magazine," said Ms. Quon. "You can't have one without the other."

"I'm going to buy an iPad!" said Ms. Hirschberg.

"I'm going to buy one for you," said Ms. Quon.

"I'm going to buy an iPad! I'm going to buy an iPad! I don't have a computer, so this is a big moment for me," continued Ms. Hirschberg.

And how does she write her stories now without a computer?

"I don't type them," said Ms. Hirschberg. "I give a handwritten copy to someone who types them, who I pay."

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

Someday, when they tell the story of how digital magazines saved Conde Nast, it will begin in San Francisco's Caffé Centro sometime in May 2009. 

It was there that Wired creative director Scott Dadich asked Wired editor Chris Anderson to meet him to discuss the creation of a prototype for a new digital tablet. Mr. Dadich knew the iPhone screen was far too small to re-create the magazine experience, but it got him thinking about a Minority Report-like touchscreen that could work. Mr. Dadich took out a cocktail napkin and drew an illustration of what Wired could look like on a 13-inch tablet screen.

The sketch worked. Mr. Dadich got the go-ahead to make a prototype (which they dubbed, cutely, Project 13), and skimmed a few thousand dollars off his own budget to make a five-minute video about the project. The video was a hit with Condé executives, who asked other editors and publishers to watch it. It was used to forge an alliance between Condé Nast and Adobe.

And about a year later, the cocktail napkin would take the form of the Wired iPad app, the first bona fide success in publishing's transition to digital apps. It has sold 102,884 copies since it hit the market, an impressive feat for a company that had been floundering digitally. Only weeks after its release, Condé Nast executives said they were changing the company's business model, appointing Bob Sauerberg as the company's new president to focus on new revenue streams, much of it from the digital experience. And sensing that they might be ahead of the competition when it comes to turning magazines into apps, executives at the company gave Mr. Dadich, all of 34 years old, an office at 4 Times Square, a new title-executive director of digital magazine development — to add to his role at Wired, and the assignment to help nearly every magazine in Condé's stable create a digital edition.

One result is that Mr. Dadich, who has lived most of his life in Texas, has skyrocketed into an overnight star in the Si Newhouse empire. He is — to put it in terms that have described many before him — the new It Boy of publishing. Having already established his print magazine design chops — Evan Smith, the editor of the Texas Tribune and Mr. Dadich's former boss at Texas Monthly, said he is regarded as "some sort of combination of Jesus and Pele" in the print magazine design world — it now seems like he is on the road to doing something much more significant.

His job, on paper, is to help editors at magazines like The New Yorker and Vogue manage their time and brainstorm ideas about what works on the iPad. But at a time when Newsweek goes for $1 and the industry is in desperate need for heroes, Mr. Dadich is widely seen as the guy who can bridge magazine design and technology, and bring the business one step closer to salvation.   

"He's one of those clever people who can take history and the future and merge them into the present," said Platon, a New Yorker photographer who has won two consecutive National Magazine Awards for photo portfolios and credits Mr. Dadich for giving him his start in America. "People have done that before in other genres. Miles Davis did it, Frank Lloyd Wright did that. And I think Scott has the capacity to do that."

"With a talent like Scott, magazines will never die," said George Lois, the legendary former art director of Esquire.

"He just has it," said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.

"He will be the spark that ignites a conflagration," said Tom Wallace, Condé Nast's editorial director.

MR. DADICH GOT his first big break at Texas Monthly. Ten years ago, Evan Smith was coming in as editor and needed to find a new art director. Mr. Smith had little reason to consider Mr. Dadich, who was then just freshly out of school and in the job of associate art director for a mere nine months. He had virtually no previous experience. The art director position at Texas Monthly had been held by legends like Fred Woodward and DJ Stout. But when Mr. Smith met Mr. Dadich, he knew there was something unique about him. "I had an intuition," said Mr. Smith. "He had a combination of charisma and seriousness of purpose and a bigness about his ambition. You could see from talking to him for a very short period of time he had a plan — he had a plan for himself, and he had a plan for you."

Mr. Smith had a lot on the line. Every magazine editor ties his early fate to the art director. Mr. Smith conducted a national search, and there were plenty of candidates, but he couldn't get Mr. Dadich out of his head. So Mr. Smith called off the job search and decided to make a go of it with the 24-year-old. The business-side people down the hallway cringed at this prospect. "I think in every profession there are people who are born with certain skills and a degree of interests that just propel them forward like a rocket booster," said Mr. Smith.

Quickly, Mr. Smith's leap of faith was well rewarded, and Mr. Dadich's tenure as art director became almost as celebrated as his predecessors.  

Wired had heard about him, and after several rounds of interviews, the magazine snagged him in 2006 to become its creative director. He became the first person ever to win both the National Magazine Award for Design and the Society of Publication Designers Magazine of the Year award three consecutive years, in 2008, 2009 and 2010. George Lois said that when you line up Mr. Dadich with the all-time-great magazine designers, "he's now joining the club." 

But being a design guy for a print product was hardly where Mr. Dadich wanted to stop. "He has business skills, organizational skills, technical skills," said Mr. Anderson, Wired's editor. "This is a guy who can have a deep conversation about Objective-C architecture with one guy, a deep conversation about typography with another and a deep conversation about business models and distribution strategies with another."

"He always demonstrated to me an interest in the magazine from the 360-degree perspective that most art directors don't have," said Mr. Smith. "He cared about the business side, he cared about circulation, he cared about ad sales, he cared about everything, the whole thing."

IT WAS THE SECOND DAY in Mr. Dadich's new seventh-floor office at 4 Times Square, and the space was entirely empty, except for George Lois' MoMA Esquire book, an iPad and a document on his desk that was addressed to Condé Nast executives about the Wired tablet and labeled HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL. He was wearing a perfectly tailored blazer ("You gotta write all about his style!" said Cindi Leive, the Glamour editor), and he has perfect posture, well-groomed sideburns and slicked-back hair with a couple strands inadvertently straggling out, like Alfalfa. He speaks clearly and deliberately in a dry monotone, and the Lubbock native seems to somehow shed any trace of a Texas drawl ("I hide it pretty well," he said).

"I believe in the power of technology to upend an industry," Mr. Dadich said. "We see that every day at Wired. We watch how technology radically alters landscapes.

"The only reason magazine design looks the way it does is because it's the literal, physical limitations of two pieces of paper," he said.

"With this," he said, gesturing to an iPad sitting on a couch, "we wiped the slate clean. We have one pane. We have these many pixels. We have this proportion. How are we going to use it and how are we going to tell a story?"

The iPad happens to be the first of these devices. But as more tablet devices pop up on the landscape, it will become unwieldy to reassign the iPad work to outsiders. Today, he has no way to leverage the skills of, say, his art director in a digital environment since it requires two different skill sets with two different programs.

In Mr. Dadich's ideal, it will work like this: A design editor will open up his computer screen and there will be four images down the right-hand side. Two will be dedicated to tablet devices; another is for the printed product; the last is for a mobile device. The design director will lay out a page unique to each medium. If you're a story editor or a copy editor, you'll make a change once, and it will show up in every version.

Condé Nast's partnership with Adobe will allow magazine makers to use the same set of Adobe tools — Creative Suite, which makes InDesign — for both the printed version and the iPad.

This may be Mr. Dadich's dream, but it's not his alone. Adobe and Apple have been warring for years. In anticipation of the iPad release, Adobe had been preparing software that would essentially convert Condé Nast's content into an iPad and iPhone application. Weeks before the iPad was released, Apple said it wouldn't allow cross-compilers, and said that companies like Adobe had to build everything using Apple's own native software kit.

The people at Adobe and Wired engineered a quick-fix solution. They decided to do everything they normally do in Adobe's Creative Suite package, and then simply use pictures of them — PNG files — for the app while keeping little holes open for interactive elements. The Wired app was a ridiculously large file for this reason, and it takes a long time to download. This is something Mr. Dadich and Condé Nast will have to iron out if they want this thing to have real legs. But it was enough to fool consumers, and the success of the June launch was enough to convince people like Tom Wallace to go forward.

There is no indication yet how the Wired app did in July. Condé Nast will not release the numbers — which is probably a good indication that it's selling poorly when compared to June — but at this point, people seem happy with the direction of things. 

Though three of the four magazines at Condé that have iPad apps have been developed by Condé Nast Digital, the Adobe projects are the most ambitious. Up next: The New Yorker. "I think Scott Dadich is going to play a serious role in developing the design of The New Yorker in print, on devices and on the Web," said Mr. Remnick, whose magazine is expected to have an October iPad launch. "And I invited him into that process because he precisely understands not only the design so well, but also is interested in making The New Yorker a better version of itself rather than an extension of Scott Dadich."

MR. DADICH NEVER was a big reader of magazines growing up. He was an arts kid in high school, briefly attended the University of Texas to study engineering, but transferred out and went back to his hometown of Lubbock to work in a bagel shop, where he drew the menu lettering and pictures of bagels and coffee cups on a blackboard. When a graphic designer saw his work, he scored a job at an ad agency. He enrolled in the design program at Texas Tech and did his ad agency job on the side to pay his way through college.

His flyover roots have won him fans. "Listen, I love Scott," said Ms. Leive, the editor of Glamour. "I love and I think lots of other editors love his willingness to share what he knows."

"He's this really nice, fun and amiable guy, and people wanna help him and bring him along," said Mr. Smith.

Fine qualities! But they would mean nothing if he wasn't scary-smart, too. "You're talking about finding a way to make digital magazines in parallel with printed magazines without going crazy," said Mr. Anderson. "There are so many moving pieces with digital magazines. There are thousands of individual elements with portraits and landscapes and interactive elements and all that. You need to think like a spreadsheet to ensure that you get the product out the door."

"The thing about the technology is, it is always the latest gimmick, the latest hot thing," said Platon, the photographer. "It's very seductive. For me, what makes Scott interesting is his respect for content. Of course, he does have this uncanny sensibility of embracing technology — not even what it is now, but what it will be. But he also has a deep understanding and respect for good design. I'm talking about history of design. That's where most technology goes wrong. The taste level is shit. It looks awful. There's no intellect behind it. There's no aesthetic behind it."

Mr. Dadich, he said, somehow overcomes this, bridging tech and design. "That's why he's powerful," he said. "He has good taste. He has done his homework. He knows the history of design and art and it's enabling him to do something with the technology."

"THIS IS OUR future, it's a very big part of our future and it's in our immediate future," said Mr. Wallace.

He was talking about digital magazines and how they would play a "major role" at Condé Nast and the rest of the magazine industry. "We're at the beginning of what I think is going to be just a monumental creative burst for this industry," he continued. "And Scott is the guy who is there at the beginning of this. He's helping to birth it — there's no question about that."

He said that Mr. Dadich's role, for now, is to instruct everyone on the lessons he learned from the Adobe experience. Mr. Wallace emphasized that the job is temporary, as Mr. Dadich helps everyone else get up to speed. Then, each magazine will go on its merry way and return to competing directly against its corporate siblings. From there, he wants Mr. Dadich to have a big role in the company to figure out ... well, whatever.

But what does Mr. Dadich want? "I'm happiest when I'm creating," he said. "And I would love to be an editor; I would love to take all of what I'm learning now and apply that specifically to something."

"There will be a point when I will want to go and create content in this model," he continued, "and assimilate all the lessons I've learned in this process into a physical product — maybe it's an iPad-only magazine, maybe it's a launch."

Whether he's right or wrong, he's a believer. "We're only just starting. The opportunities for connection and engagement are so high. The ability to bring in all those different kinds of experiences and all those different kinds of people who maybe don't think of paper magazines, or who think of the connection that happens when you find a brand you love."

jkoblin@observer.com