Word: fullers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...came as a jolt to members of the Manhattan publishing community--chief among them Whitney--when the revered editor was ousted a week ago and replaced by her rival, Cosmo editor Bonnie Fuller, 41, who took over Hearst's sex-and-the-single-girl book from Helen Gurley Brown just 18 months ago. Fuller's successor at Cosmo will be Redbook editor Kate White...
...Fuller, a Toronto native, arrived in the U.S. nine years ago to reinvent the teen magazine YM, and was soon to develop a reputation for making magazines profitable by tarting them up. At the time, YM combined health and relationship advice with reporting on serious subjects such as apartheid (that topic was covered by current New Yorker writer William Finnegan). Fuller relieved the magazine of such weightiness, turning YM into a primer on waist trimming and boy procuring--a junior Cosmo--and more than doubling its circulation. At the real Cosmo, which she joined after a stint as editor...
Whitney, who had planned to retire in the next few years, was stunned by Fuller's installation and distressed that she hadn't been asked for input in naming her successor. Fuller would not have been on her short list. "I told S.I. Newhouse [Conde Nast's owner] how disappointed I was in the choice," Whitney says. "I don't think Bonnie has the track record to uphold Glamour's journalistic standards, and I fear for what the magazine may lose. This is saying that only numbers matter and that women's magazines are just commodities...
Whitney's devoted writers and editors worry about the kind of internal culture that Fuller, who has a reputation as a prima donna and a harsh manager, will create. "Under Whitney," says an editor, "there are no tears, no screaming fits, no fabulous darlings." To her credit, Fuller is known to be very loyal to favored staff members. Catherine Romano, who worked as an editor under Fuller at YM, MC and Cosmo, explains that while Fuller can be "tough and demanding," she finds talent in people "and lets them max out on their ability...
Last week some media watchers speculated that Fuller's installation was provoked in part by Conde Nast CEO Steve Florio's machismo. Poaching the enemy can appear heroic. As an editor of a major women's magazine put it, "There's been so much bad press about him he had to change the dial." (Florio took a beating in a recent FORTUNE piece that accused him of atrocious management and of lying about the profitability of Conde Nast publications...