The last time we checked in with Bonnie Fuller, in August, the ex-Us Weekly editor was seeking "partners, financing and advertiser support" for a website aimed at women 20-40. That can't be going well right about now. Which might explain how OK! magazine could afford to bring on Fuller as a consultant, as CoverAwards is reporting, even though she was recently pulling down $2.1 million per year as editorial director at American Media Inc.
Why does former tabloid queen Bonnie Fuller think Britney Spears is "more civilized" than Sarah Palin? Because she reads, or so says Fuller: "Criticize Britney all you want for her bad choices in men and her barefoot trips to public restrooms, but you can’t accuse her of not reading. As any tabloid fan will attest, Britney has routinely been photographed carrying books—from, ahem, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue—Book 1." Well, that settles that! [NYT/The Moment]
No one knows if Jamie Lynn Spears is really pregnant. But former tabloid queen Bonnie Fuller has a rather fanciful theory for why Spears got knocked up (if, that is, she's pregnant in the first place): "Like everyone else in the country, she's a victim of Palin Fever. But in this case, it's Bristol Palin mania. My guess is that Jamie Lynn didn't like it one bit that there was a new pregnant 17 year-old in town and upstaging her all over the news." [HuffPo]
♦ David Letterman ripped into John McCain once again last night, which he'll probably continue to do as long as he gets this much attention for it. [NYT]
♦ Sarah Ivens is out as the editor-in-chief of the moneylosing tabloid OK! And, no, Bonnie Fuller is not taking over. [NYP]
♦ CNBC's David Faber is writing a book about the Wall Street meltdown, too. [NYO]
♦ ABC won the Thursday night ratings war thanks to the two-hour season premiere of Grey's Anatomy. [TV Decoder]
♦ Brigitte Quinn and Page Hopkins are leaving Fox News. [TV Newser]
♦ The Magazine Publishers of America will announce the winner of the cover of the year on Monday; here are the three finalists. [Jossip]
As if celebrity babies didn't face enough perils — paparazzi, feuding celebrity parents, ill-advised playdates with Michael Jackson — they now have to keep a weary little eye on the stock market. Because amid Wall Street meltdown and the worst advertising decline in seven years rumors are now swirling that the undisputed highroller in the market for pictures of famous infants, OK! magazine, is cutting off payments for exclusive shots of the little tykes. (Sure, the fees usually went to charity, but you can't put a price tag on adulation.) New general manager Kent Brownridge has allegedly said "no more picture buying, and to keep readers interested we will have to 'get creative,'" a disgruntled staffer told Page Six. Underlings are no doubt praying Brownridge doesn't confirm another rumor and squander the savings hiring boss-from-hell Bonnie Fuller to replace a departing Sarah Ivens. Reports the Post:
Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller, who floats menacingly over the celebrity media like mist on a bog, has a new web venture in the works. She also has an insatiable thirst for money. And, of course, she has but a tenuous grasp on reality as a whole. Which of these is the explanation for the elusive question: Why the fuck has she spent the last several months writing the same meandering column over and over for increasingly unlikely outlets? It started earlier this summer with her ruminations in Ad Age about Madonna's celebrity conspiracy, Obama's celebrity conspiracy, and Sarah Palin's celebrity conspiracy. What appeal did these columns hold for members of the ad industry? Idle entertainment, we imagine. But now Bonnie's writing for MediaPost, for Christ's sake. About celebrities!
Bonnie Fuller isn't employed at the moment, which means she should have plenty of time to celebrate her birthday today: the tabloid queen is 52. Maybe she can share a birthday cake with the New York Times' David Carr: He turns 52 today, too. Others celebrating: Real estate mogul Howard Lorber is 60. Food writer Amanda Hesser is 37. Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Bobby Kennedy and ex-wife of Andrew Cuomo, is 49. Singer/songwriter Aimee Mann is 48. David Arquette is 37. Pink is 29. Swimsuit model and former E! host Brooke Burke is 37. And '90s teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas turns 27.
"Having been the editor-in-chief of teen magazine YM for five years, and now as the mother of a 17-year-old girl myself, there are a few things I know." What does that sentence tell you? That's right, it's time to hear another one of former Star editor Bonnie Fuller's unique screeds comparing the Presidential race to various moments in celebrity history! Here is why Sarah Palin is just like Lynne Spears:
American Media, the publisher of Star and the National Enquirer, has come to an agreement with its creditors to "refinance" $570 million of its more than $1 billion in total debt. That's code for going to the people you owe money to and saying, "Funniest thing—I just can't pay you. Wanna change our deal a little bit? Or would you prefer I just declare bankruptcy and we both get screwed?" As savvy financial types like to say, if you owe the bank $1 million, they own you; if you owe the bank $1 billion, you own them. Although AMI squandered millions needlessly on things like, you know, the services of Bonnie Fuller, the Enquirer's upsurge from the John Edwards scoop may be just the thing to push them back towards profitability. If they can figure out how to sell some extra ads on it, that is. AMI's ad sales were down slightly in the first half, though not as much as the rest of the industry. So chin up. Remember, down is the new flat! [WSJ]
You know how you are always saying to yourself "What the world needs now is a website… that would devote itself to chronicling the entertainment industry"? Well, another half million venture capital dollars has found a home trying to do that under the great helmsladyship of ex-New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman. So now it's a trend, this "internet as representing some sort of future for the media" thing! Because Tina Brown told us last week her plans for internet moguldum involve a new website called the Daily Beast, and Bonnie Fuller confirmed she was starting her own new website a few weeks before that, and while Waxman is not, like the two other media divas, internet retarded — she has a blog! — she is a lady, and as with the other two we hope her venture, The Wrap LLC fails because we're sick of having new sites we're supposed to check on the internet.
Seriously, what's going on with these Bonnie Fuller columns in Ad Age? The deposed Star chief must still be desperate for cash. And Ad Age must be desperate for amusement, because the main thing these columns do is expose the fact that Bonnie Fuller-despite being paid astronomical amounts of money by several media moguls-is not all that bright. At least when it comes to writing about and/ or analyzing things. Her last column blew the big A-Rod-and-Madonna conspiracy wide open; and today, she reveals what's really going on with Barack Obama's "celebrity" strategy. The twisted truth must come out! You see, Barack Obama didn't just stumble onto the cover of People magazine by chance. Oh no. It's all part of a big PR strategy! That's how things work in the high-level circles to which Bonnie Fuller is privy:
It looks like American Media didn't cut its $2.4-million-per-year editorial chief Bonnie Fuller fast enough: the tabloid publisher is reportedly nearly broke, desperately trying to raise money before a bunch of junk bonds come due in February. Granted, those bonds are worth $415 million, so Fuller's salary is only a sliver of the problem, but had Fuller delivered on hopes she could improve Star and National Enquirer enough to beat back competitors like Us Weekly and People perhaps the situation might not be so bleak. The company's worth has fallen by half in seven months, and its private equity owners will likely give up equity to keep it going. Perhaps some sort of juicy scandal will come along to breathe some life into the firm! [Post]
Now that Bonnie Fuller's been kicked out of American Media, she can finally reveal the dirty secrets of how the Celebrity Tabloid game is really played. It's all an elaborate Watergate-like conspiracy! The celebs are in collusion with the glossies! You know that thing where baseball player Alex Rodriguez was suddenly hanging out with Madonna and divorcing his wife? Remember that? You know how none of it made any sense? Well Fuller-whose career in the tabloid trenches gives her a special understanding of how these sorts of stories work-smells a rat. An aerobics-addicted 49-year-old celebrity rat.
Bonnie Fuller was axed last month from her job as editorial chief of American Media. But the company gave her $2.4 million in fiscal year 08, which is 50% more than even CEO David Pecker got. And AMI, which is facing some serious financial challenges of its own, was planning a $2 million severance package for her if she left by the end of March (since she didn't, they haven't revealed her actual severance—but it's surely in that ballpark). Fuller's rich, but she's still a well-known neurotic about money issues, dating back to her own mother's rough period of being broke after a divorce. Understandable—but it doesn't really give one the right to start yelling at the good people from the freaking Make-A-Wish foundation, as Fuller once famously did when she thought they were being too stingy:
For unclear reasons, the Times felt compelled to hand a huge chunk of its Sunday Business section over to a profile of Bonnie Fuller—the woman most responsible for creating our nation's soul-destroying cast of powerful celebrity magazines—who was recently axed from her multimillion-dollar gig as editorial chief of American Media. A sympathetic profile! The news peg, purportedly: Bonnie Fuller is doing some vague new project on the internet. For women! With specifics to be determined! Color us skeptical. The Fuller that the Times describes does not sound like the woman who was so despised by her assistants that they put snot in her food. What's the major malfunction here?
Bonnie Fuller, the recently deposed editorial chief of American Media, the company that publishes illustrious titles like the Star and National Enquirer, has been on a press blitz in recent weeks, part of an attempt, we're guessing, to divert attention from the fact she was fired a few weeks ago, lied about it on her mother's grave, and teamed up with a venture capital firm for about five seconds before they, too, cut their ties. On Sunday, Fuller managed to finagle the Times' David Carr into penning an absurdly saccharine-sweet profile of her. It was apparently pegged to some sort of digital venture she has in the works, and yet she revealed next to nothing about her upcoming plans. How Bonnie!
Class resentment and anonymous speech on the internet make a toxic combination. (According to Fucked Company, I once paid for lazik eye surgery for a young MBA on staff whom I actually despised.) But occasionally the office legends are accurate-which is lucky because there were some particularly lurid stories about axed Star supremo Bonnie Fuller. Before the stake was put through her heart, the celebrity mag editor was so demanding and abusive to her underlings that she warranted her very own rumor message board, 'I Survived Bonnie'. The demand for first-class tickets from the Make-A-Wish charity? The bullied assistants who exacted revenge by rubbing snot in her souffle and crotch juice on the bread? All true, according to 2004's bitchy profile by Judith Newman of Vanity Fair. After the jump, read about the editor who made all her counterparts look like saints.
