Last week the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal ran an editorial asking Buffet, the namesake of a proposed guideline that would ensure that those who make more than $1 million pay proportional tax rates, to make public his tax returns. “No doubt the millions of Americans who could end up paying more because of this claim would love to see the details,” they wrote, urging the Berkshire Hathaway CEO to consider the disclosure an “opportunity to educate the public” on “his secret of tax avoidance.”

When asked during Fortune‘s Mot Powerful Women Summit whether or not he would be willing to do so, Buffett said he would be happy to — so long as News Corp’s most superior might join him.

“I think it might be a terrific idea if they would just ask their boss, Rupert Murdoch, and he and I will meet at Fortune, and we’ll both give you our tax returns and you can publish them,” Buffet said, contending that perhaps he’s not the one with anything to hide. “I’m ready tomorrow morning,” he added.

There never was much harm nor foul in a game of I’ll-show-you-mine, you-show-me-yours…

Saturday night, I was a guest of Time Magazine at the star-studded Time-CNN-People-Fortune pre-reception in the Washington Hilton’s Lincoln Room. According to Time (although I can vouch for most of it), the guest list included:

Here is a list of some of the politicians, media, and celebs that stopped by: Chris Colfer; Mila Kunis; Matthew Morrison; Mira Sorvino; Jon Hamm; Colin Powell; Steve Buscemi; Wolf Blitzer; Twitter co-founder Evan Williams; Eric Stonestreet, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Ariel Winter from “Modern Family;” Sen, Scott Brown; Alyssa Milano; Jason Biggs; Bristol Palin; Chace Crawford; Candy Crowley; Tony Romo; Russell Simmons; Michelle Trachtenberg; Tom Hooper; Tara Subkoff; Tory Burch; Timothy Geithner;  David Plouffe; Eliot Spitzer; Anita Dunn; Meghan McCain and TIME Managing Editor Stengel; People Managing Editor Larry Hackett; FORTUNE Managing Editor Andy Serwer.

TIME WHCD guests Jay Roach, director and executive producer of “Game Change” for HBO and Danny Strong, producer of “Game Change” mingled with TIME’s Mark Halperin, co-author of the best selling book that they are adapting.

I didn’t shoot a whole lot of video (although I did get a decent number of still shots), as this was mainly a social occasion, but just enough to get a sense of the atmosphere.

On my way to the hotel, I ran into David Shuster and another old friend of mine, and as we walked into the hotel, I was stunned to see a dense crowd of media covering the entry. In the first section of video, that’s Shuster and a colleague working the velvet rope, while the rest of us continued in to the hotel.

Later, I spotted The Office star Mindy Kaling (who plays Kelly Kapoor on the show), and asked her what made her want to attend our little dinner.

The laugh of the night, for me, came from Fox News anchor Chris Wallace who, when I introduced myself, narrowed his eyes into a suspicious glare, held up his hand, and said, “Wait, who are you with? Media Matters?”

I laughed and said, “No, those guys hate me.”

I also ran into former White House Communications Director (and Fox-fighting heroine to many on the left) Anita Dunn, who immediately volunteered that she “loves Mediaite.com,” which I then made her repeat on-camera (after quizzing her to make sure she was really talking about us, and not Media Matters).

As I was speaking with Dunn, who should wander over but Mediaite Editor-at-Large Rachel Sklar, who contributed her own set of party photos to this post.

After the dinner, (which I spent filming protesters outside the hotel, and watching the President and Seth Meyers in a suite full of Rachel Sklar‘s pals) I went to the buzzed-about Capitol File after-party in the Reagan building. The balance of the video is a brief shot of the Cap File party, and a minute or so of a killjoy Code Pink protester, who, I found out, annoyed even the liberals in the crowd.

People I ran into but didn’t photograph include: Jake Tapper and wife Jennifer (who were leaving the pre-parties as I came in), Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (who streaked through the party like a fiscal Frank the Tank), Glee star Matthew Morrison (who unwittingly threw a pick-move on me as I tried to track Geithner down), Meghan McCain (who I saw but didn’t really recognize until I saw her name on the post-party email), Joe Klein, CNN‘s Will Cain, Dan Lothian and Suzanne Malveaux, Morning Joe EP Chris Licht, HuffPo‘s Sam Stein and Jon Ward, Will.i.am, AP‘s Ben Feller, The Washington Times‘ Liz Glover, and ABC News Radio‘s Ann Compton (I did photograph Ann, who looked like a million bucks, but the pictures were too dark).

Here’s a gallery of stills that I took Saturday night, along with some further observations, followed by a slew of stills from Rachel Sklar.

[Show as slideshow]

Gallery

Fortune has an interesting (and, we think, likely correct) theory about Black’s rather unexpected appointment to her former position:

I mentioned one of my theories that could have been at play: “the glass cliff.” This is practically the reverse of the well-trodden “glass ceiling” that keeps many women from reaching the top. Ambitious women find themselves on the “glass cliff” after well-intentioned men, in pursuit of diversity goals, appoint them to positions beyond their level of competence. Women can’t say “no” to the opportunity…and then they fail, usually quite publicly.

“There may be some truth in that,” Black says, all but admitting that for a manager like her, with no professional experience in education, heading America’s largest public school system was above her capabilities. “It was like having to learn Russian in a weekend — and then give speeches in Russian and speak Russian in budget committee and City Council meetings.”

Black also surmises that being a woman may have also had an impact on the mostly negative coverage surrounding her appointment by Mayor Bloomberg. Would the press have been as hard on her has she been a man? Would New York magazine have chosen to post an unflattering picture of her as its cover image had she have been male?

Well, who knows right? Maybe, as a man with the same resume, she wouldn’t have been offered the job in the first place. Or maybe the press would have been harsher if she’d been fat, or balding, or not white, or not rich… or… or… The list goes on and on, as it always does when one engages in a game of “What if?”

But, like we said, don’t feel bad for Black! She can finally wear what she wants to. So there:

Clearly she’s disappointed, but she is also relieved — to escape the paparazzi, dress in designer clothes again, and eat at old haunts like Michael’s, the media-elite lunchtime canteen.

And basically get back to the life she enjoyed. This morning, she had breakfast at Three Guys, a diner near her Park Avenue home. When she got up to leave, she said, people clapped.

“I’m a warrior,” vows Black, who is 66 — and apparently game to move on to another major gig.

Mmm. Back in Balenciaga and it feels so good.

h/t Fortune

O’Brien tells FORTUNE‘s Douglas Warsaw that he recalls being told, “The network isn’t crazy about you tweeting. They’re not sure that’s cool.” O’Brien called their bluff: “Tell them I would be thrilled if they shut down my Twitter account. I’d love it if that got out. You think PR’s been bad up till now? Wait till you take away my Twitter account.”

The sting of losing The Tonight Show has still not faded for O’Brien, who returned to late night on TBS. He tells FORTUNE his experience reminded him of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

“You know that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie where he gets thrown through the truck windshield by a Nazi? I was thrown through the windshield of broadcasting. I made a decision and that decision very quickly led to me walking away from the crown jewel of old broadcasting and, in addition to that, being legally prohibited from going on television…. Ten years ago, if my situation with NBC had unfolded, none of this would have happened. Yeah, maybe I was 10 years too late to do The Tonight Show that I wanted to do. But I was just in the nick of time. Do you know what I mean?”

The interview hits newsstands Monday.

The mogul recently sat down with Fortune‘s Patricia Sellers to discuss the evolution of OWN and how exactly she’ll be making the transition from running her talk show in Chicago to running her network in Los Angeles. It’s going to be a big job—albeit one that’s, at least potentially, going to be incredibly lucrative:

By populating and evangelizing on OWN 24/7 — a daunting 1,200 hours of programming a year — Oprah realized that she had the opportunity to increase her impact on the world and make some nice money along the way. Bank of America Merrill Lynch media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen thinks that OWN will attract more than $145 million in ad revenue in its first year of operation. (That would put OWN in the league of such cable networks as The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, according to SNL Kagan.) Depending on ratings, it could turn a profit of $100 million in year three and grow significantly from there — making it one of the most successful media launches this past decade, rivaling the introduction of O, The Oprah Magazine, a partnership of Harpo and Hearst, in 2000.

Not that any of this matters to “authentic” Oprah, who insists she cares more than anything about being true to her viewers. “My fear about ‘Will the people really follow me?’ — I’m past that,” says Oprah. This past summer, she says, she was reading a magazine article about Michael Jackson and was riveted by a quote from a former colleague of the late superstar. The friend said that after Jackson released Thriller in 1982 and it became the all-time best-selling album, he was paralyzed by the notion that he could never top that. “All the bells went off,” says Oprah. “This is why I lived in fear about this network. I kept thinking I have to repeat the 25-year phenomenon of the Oprah show.” She adds: “I don’t want to be Michael Jackson.”

Later, Sellers writes that OWN might be worth a staggering $3 billion “in a few years,” which would make it a match for Winfrey’s own $3 billion net worth.

The interview isn’t all about money. Winfrey also reveals what sorts of programs will appear on OWN. Unsurprisingly, the slate is filled mostly with uplifting reality shows and showcases for Winfrey herself. It includes Kidnapped by the Kids, a series in which “the children of work addicts literally capture their parents and take away their e-mail access and office time until they change their ways;” a six-part docuseries starring Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, as she adjusts to life without her fortune; a new talk show hosted by Rosie O’Donnell; and Oprah’s Next Chapter, a follow-up to Winfrey’s talk show that will “show her running around the globe, exploring places she’s never been, like the Sahara desert, and interviewing locals.”

There will also be a reality competition series called Your Own Show, in which wannabe Winfreys will battle to win their own talk show on OWN.

You can read the Fortune cover story in full here.

Officially, they aren’t going to cheer on their country’s team in a football match, but rather to discuss business, economic, and social opportunities in developing nations at the 11th annual FORTUNE/TIME/CNN Global Forum in Cape Town. The forum, dubbed “The New Global Opportunity,” runs from June 26 to 28, during which time attendees will explore the “extraordinary promise of the developing world” with special emphasis on Africa.

The guest list is actually remarkably impressive, including some of the world’s greatest leaders and thinkers (so get ready for some name dropping): Former President Bill Clinton will be there, along with French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and Former Prime Minister of Pakistan Shaukat Aziz. Beyond world leaders, chairmen and CEOs of multinational companies like Coca-Cola, AstraZeneca, and Motorola will also be in attendance.

Being organized by FORTUNE, TIME, and CNN, media personalities – including Katie Couric and Charlie Rose – will be involved, with FORTUNE managing editor Andy Serwer, TIME managing editor Richard Stengel, and CNN lead political anchor Wolf Blitzer acting as moderators and presenters. 17 members of the FORTUNE 500 list and 20 TIME 100 honorees will speak at the forum.

According to Stengel:

“The New Global Opportunity represents the idea that global economic power is shifting to the developing world and that these markets are more than just frontiers of growth; they are the sources of new ideas and models that can be applied everywhere. Growth must be inclusive and sustainable. And the role and potential of those who have been marginalized in the past-the poor, especially women and girls-will only grow.”

With the whole world currently watching South Africa, this forum is in the right place at the right time. We might not see Katie Couric score on a penalty kick against Bill Clinton, but hopefully some good comes out of this.

Once upon a time the December newsstand was filled with angels, Christmas trees and Santas of all shapes and sizes. And this wasn’t just Christian iconography; these were covers that were funny, creative, surprising, provocative, that made political statements, and most of all, that engaged their readers in a visual dialogue. Now, with the notable exception of the New Yorker, the only attempt at Christmas creativity comes on the occasional women’s service magazine, with sad little plates of cookies or fruitcakes. We’re going to get all George Lois here and say that what was once an opportunity for brilliant magazine-making has now become just another set of bland, focus-grouped, by-the-numbers covers, put together by folks who are scared stiff of offending or provoking anyone.

Esquire, Fortune, Playboy, Vanity Fair, New York: it’s time to put the X back into those December covers! End the War on Christmas Magazine Covers. Who knows, magazines might even increase those newsstand sell-through numbers that are all doing so terribly if they just get back into the holiday spirit.

We’ve collected the Top 20 Christmas Magazine Covers of All Time. In the interests of non-sectarianism, we avoided covers that were mere reproductions of classic Christmas religious art. We stuck with Santa Claus, Christmas trees and gifts, and we found a lot of great ones. Who could deny that our world would be a much better place with a return to this fun and soulful style of magazine covers?

Esquire, 1963: The classic George Lois-designed December 1963 Esquire cover, featuring world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.

GQ, 1974: GQ, back in 1974, when it was known as Gentlemen’s Quarterly, featuring Barbara Streisand.

The New Yorker, 2005: We’ve got to give many props to The New Yorker, for maintaining a high quality of holiday covers. This one, by illustrator Anita Kunz in 2005 captured the middle-of-the-Iraq War malaise perfectly.

Jet, 1968: Jet magazine has a long history of putting celebrities in Santa outfits on their covers. Bill Cosby, Marvin Gaye, Sherman Hemsley (twice!) have all graced the cover, but none was better than the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, celebrating Black Christmas in the Ghetto in 1968.

Baltimore City Paper, 1999: Back in 1999, Shepard Fairey was still a scrappy street artist and poster-maker. He did this cover for alternative weekly newspaper Baltimore City Paper, who ran it just like this, without headlines or even a cover logo.

National Lampoon, 1970: This December 1970 cover of the National Lampoon is a classic, with fighter planes from an unidentified Asian Communist country (North Vietnam? North Korea?) shooting down poor Santa as they yell “Eat death, bloated lackey of the capitalist toy mongers!”

Fortune, 1938: For many years after its launch in 1930, Fortune ran beautiful, elegant, illustrated holiday covers. We could have filled a whole list of 20 with their brilliant selections, but this one, from 1938, by Antonio Petrucelli, struck us as singularly memorable.

>>>NEXT: Andy Warhol gets his 15 minutes, and more.

]]> http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-war-on-christmas-magazine-covers/feed/ 3 http://www.mediaite.com/print/a-retrospective-28-media-leaders-who-died-this-decade/ http://www.mediaite.com/print/a-retrospective-28-media-leaders-who-died-this-decade/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:52:50 +0000 Danny Groner http://www.mediaite.com/?p=49532 New York Times obituaries.]]>

As the face of media evolves, it’s important to honor the figures who helped define, shape and set the standards in their industries. These are some of the most prominent members of the media who passed away over the past 10 years.  Take a look back with some snippets from their respective New York Times obituaries.

2000

Who: Charles Schultz
Major Accomplishment: His ‘Peanuts” strip reached readers in 75 countries, 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. Schulz drew more than 18,250 strips in nearly 50 years.
Legacy: His saga of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus ”is arguably the longest story ever told by one human being,” Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, observed.

Who: Steve Allen
Major Accomplishment: In more than 50 years in show business, Allen demonstrated his talents in many areas. An accomplished pianist who never learned to read music, he composed more than 5,000 songs, some of them hits.
Legacy: Allen was keenly interested in social justice and wrote pamphlets on a variety of issues, including the problems facing migrant workers, as well as capital punishment and nuclear proliferation.

Editor’s Note: Mediaite has been rightly called out for a big, glaring error: On our list of 28 media leaders we’ve lost this decade there was not a single person of color. Not a one. Read Mediaite editor-at-large Rachel Sklar‘s entire mea culpa here and on page 11, we’ve added 5 of the deceased black media leaders that should have been mentioned initially.

>>>NEXT: In 2001 we lost William Hanna and Katharine Graham…

]]> http://www.mediaite.com/print/a-retrospective-28-media-leaders-who-died-this-decade/feed/ 7 http://www.mediaite.com/online/tough-holiday-time-inc-lets-go-staffers-days-before-thanksgiving/ http://www.mediaite.com/online/tough-holiday-time-inc-lets-go-staffers-days-before-thanksgiving/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:04:26 +0000 Colby Hall http://www.mediaite.com/?p=49805 It’s been widely reported that Time Inc. has been planning a rather significant round of lay-offs before the end of the year. The conventional wisdom around New York publishing circles was that the lay-offs would be coming after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case, as a Time Inc. spokesperson confirmed exclusively to Mediaite: “Yes, sadly there are layoffs today across a number of titles at Time Inc.”

Writing for the NY Post, Keith Kelly had previously reported last Thursday that layoffs would be coming after several staffers would volunteer for buyouts.

“The biggest magazines in the Time Inc. empire — People, Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money — should find out today how many volunteers have stepped forward to accept buyout packages.

It appears that not enough staffers stepped forward for a buyout to preclude further cuts in staffing. The spokesperson for Time Inc continued, “Today’s layoffs will mean the vast majority of layoffs announced earlier this month will be complete.”

At this point, no numbers have been confirmed as to total staffers cut.

Writing for the NY Times, Stephanie Clifford reports:

Time Inc., publisher of magazines including Time, Fortune and People, is coordinating its announcement with the third-quarter earnings report of its parent, Time Warner, sources said. The earnings report is scheduled for Wednesday morning.

The $100 million in cuts is expected to come largely from layoffs, said sources, who asked to be anonymous as they were not authorized to discuss the decision. No magazines appeared likely to close, one source said.

At Time Inc., cuts have already been heavy. A year ago, it announced it was dismissing about 600 people, or 6 percent of its staff. Since 2007, it has shut magazines including Business 2.0, Cottage Living, Southern Accents and Life, which it had revived as a newspaper supplement. A stricter expense-account policy has been in place for some time, and some magazines have decreased the weight of the paper they use. And last week, Fortune announced that it would no longer be published every other week and would reduce its frequency to 18 issues a year, from 25.

So, is the Great Pot Moment finally upon us, as Marc Jacobson wondered in his New York story? Black, the marijuana old-timer, points to the economy for the sudden renewed interest in the drug, according to the interview, and shares some surprising details about his company’s economic good fortune and its larger implications:

I wouldn’t say we’re rooting for the recession. But I will say this: the magazine industry is down across the board but High Times is up. That says something. I think there are a lot of people out there growing weed on the side to make money. Weed is recession proof.

He continues to measuredly endorse the media’s more recent coverage of the drug, remarking that “at least they’re being fair,” but notices a leftover skepticism from decades of anti-pot movements, from Reefer Madness to the war on drugs. “Stoners who grow weed grow it for themselves or for their friends,” he reminds us. “Stoners don’t carry machine guns.” And thank god for that!

Black also speaks about the future of his magazine in a time where weed is on the rise and dreams of expansion seem possible, noting, “We would love to have a TV network, playing stoner-friendly content.” Maybe he’s right: perhaps tackling taboos is the answer to print’s woes. That, and sex appeal.

Check out the rest of the interview here.

Both titles ran full-length features about marijuana in their most recent issues, taking a look, in their respective ways, at the relationship between marijuana and American law. Both stories notice that marijuana is more legal these days than you might think. But both stories mention The Volcano, a $600 vaporizer. And both make passing jabs at the Reagan era, a backward slide after the pot-smoking progress of the ’70s.

The Volcano.

Fortune senior editor Roger Parloff, who wrote the article “How marijuana became legal” mentions Reagan:

But the [Carter's federal decriminalization bill] went nowhere, and soon the movement was all but obliterated by the return swing of the cultural pendulum, now known as the Reagan Revolution. There would be no new state or federal marijuana reforms for the next 16 years.

And New York‘s Mark Jacobson, in his feature “The Splitting Image of Pot“:

I pretty much stopped thinking about marijuana as a cosmologic/shamanic/political entity around 1980, that insufficiently repressed beginning of the somnambulant Reagan time tunnel, when grass came with seeds and stems and zombies still skulked Washington Square Park reciting their “loose joints” mantra: “Smoke, smoke … try before buy, never die … smoke, smoke … ”

And there you see the difference between the two articles: Fortune‘s is dry, measured and rigorous; New York‘s is personal, on-the-ground and more insightful than informative. Fortune‘s is the story of medical marijuana policy and businesses, with sub-heads like “Dispensaries – A legal gray area,” and “Taxing and regulating dispensaries”; New York‘s is the winding exploration of marijuana arrest statistics in New York City, which reveal that cops have a special set of rules for pot-smoking black and hispanic people and another set for pot-smoking white people. Guess which is more lenient.

And, yes, New York takes a NYC angle on the story, but that shouldn’t turn you off if you don’t live here because stories about pot are much better when they are full of rich anecdotes from drug-dealers.

Like Francis, the small business dealer based in New York, who makes over $150,000 selling marijuana to New Yorkers in their apartments, who comes off the page as surprisingly professional and pragmatic:

“I hate to say it, but there’s no way I’m hiring a black guy to work for me. The chances of a black guy getting stopped is about 50 times more than a white guy. I can’t afford that. Fact is, pot is legal for white people but not for black people, which is total bullshit.”

There are also plenty of good anecdotes in the Fortune story, too, but they are of a decidedly more sterile, less exotic variety. For example, Parloff interviewed Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, who authored “Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine” (1997). Grinspoon’s wife gave pot to their teenage son, who had Leukemia, because he suffered from miserable bouts of nausea after his chemotherapy:

Having heard that marijuana could help, Grinspoon’s wife proposed that the couple let their son try it, but Grinspoon refused because it was illegal. His wife then defied him, secretly smoking marijuana with the teenager before one of his treatments. This time there was no vomiting, and in fact, on the way home the child asked to stop for a submarine sandwich. “From then on he used marijuana before every treatment, and we were all much more comfortable during the remaining year of his life,” according to Grinspoon’s account.

Parloff talked to another Harvard professor, economist Jeffrey Miron, while reporting his piece. And while Harvard scholars might have bona fide academic cred, Francis, New York mag’s source, has cred of his own, too.

Which raises an important point from all of this marijuana reportage: When it comes to pot, everyone has something to say. Even Time and NPR (highly recommended) had pieces about weed this summer. There’s definitely something in the air these days. “Could it be that, at long last,” asks Jacobson, “the Great Pot Moment is upon us?” And the answer is a resounding yes — at least at the newsstand.

Mary Louise Parker — the maintstream, not to mention sterile, face of rampant marijuana use, after her five-season success on Showtime’s Weeds. With her help, and some magic leaf, this cover could actually grab a few non-Fortune-reading stoners. And “Wall Street: One Year Later” up top is a nifty hard-news peg.

Mediaite Grade (B+): Hey, an issue of Fortune about pot — that’s pretty cool. Oh wait, Sage, the color, what are you doing here? You’re not very cool. If this cover was trying to make marijuana seem staid (which it probably is), then it’s a wild success. We wonder how their pot story stacks up to New York mag’s.

Before we snub The Economist, we want to get one thing straight: We know the cover isn’t what sells the magazine (it’s the incisive content, dummy). That said, we have to ask if these Economist covers are a nose-in-the-air smirk at the rest of the magazine industry, or just the product of uninspired designers who hate sharing an office with neurotic econ-types?

Mediaite Grade (D): We don’t need to beat a dead horse, or a series of plastic horses revolving in a circle, but this cover is bush league. Tucking the dollar sign ornament at the top of the carousel into the deck? It’s not cute. It’s not imaginative. We worry that a bunch of professionals actually sat down together and brainstormed this cover, or spent any time thinking about it at all. We’ve seen you do your best work before, Economist design team, now keep it up. If for no other reason, to set a good example for Newsweek (their cover this week — yikes).

Magazines are at their best when they jump on the next hot thing, rather than just distilling a week or month’s worth of news. The latest edition of Forbes does both, highlighting the story of high-speed computer trading, which has been percolating all summer —  a smart and timely take on the one-year anniversary of the financial collapse.

Mediaite Grade (A-): Visually, the cover’s play with font and depth is sharp; the psuedo-pyramid of faces at the bottom, illuminated by the chilling glow of computer screens, is electric. Pick up Forbes for a smart, forward-looking take on the financial world, one year after the collapse.

It’s a scary time for BusinessWeek. People are talking about buying the magazine for $1 . We wanted this cover to be a ray of light for the floundering title. Though cheap, spray-painting a gun gold and pasting it on the cover, wasn’t exactly the sizzle or pop we were hoping for.

Mediaite Grade (C+): We wonder, is there a BusinessWeek intern walking around somewhere with gold spray paint on his hands? We like the idea of putting a gun on the cover, but this one looks too fake, too gold. And the yellow at the top of the cover doesn’t exactly complement the gold below (not even yellow could make the “America’s Manufacturing Crisis” banner exciting). Add BusinessWeek‘s big, red, blocky masthead to the mix and watch the colors clash. Let’s see some hustle, BusinessWeek.

COVER WARS WINNER: Forbes nailed the one-year anniversary with a cover that subtly acknowledged the bench mark, but took the story in a new direction — the future of finance. And they had fun with the cover — not too conservative, not too boring, not too tacky. Take notes, BW, before you’re liquidated.

The re-design is apparently in response to a severe decline in revenue — the same article mentions that ad pages for the first half of 2009 have been down a whopping 39%.  Maybe it IS the art and layout that are keeping the advertisers away. Kelly also reports that Fortune ME Andy Serwer is not involved and quotes an unnamed source as saying “I don’t think it’s a happy situation.”

John Korpics will helm the re-design, a name that is almost synonymous with re-designing titles at Time Inc. After leaving InStyle, Korpics re-imagined Entertainment Weekly, then Money magazine – two titles whose total pages have not increased since getting a new look. A well-respected design director, Korpics has long been considered “one of Huey’s boys” by industry insiders. A senior editor at a major national magazine said of Korpics “Martha Nelson fired him from InStyle and Huey keeps looking after him.”

The notion of Huey taking care of his own is not lost on many – back in 2002 he created a bit of stir by removing Jim Seymour as Managing Editor of EW at the height of its success. In that spot he placed Rick Tetzeli, a trusted Huey ally and former deputy from his days of Fortune. Tetzeli stepped down from that spot earlier this year, getting “kicked upstairs” to run “special projects” for Time Inc.  Rumors of EW folding have only recently abated, perhaps due to the new leadership of new top man Jess Cagle.

Looking after his “boys” is not uncommon practice for Huey, as Kelly reports:

“To assuage any potentially bruised egos, Huey in the past month awarded Serwer with a new three-year contract, insiders said, which will keep him on the payroll until at least 2012.”

An industry insider who no longer works in magazine publishing said “What they’re doing with Andy is exactly what they did with Rick. Give him a contract to be nice, and let him work on a redesign. He probably has no idea if he’ll be fired.” The fact that Serwer was quoted by Kelly appears to support the idea that he is “playing nice” and still a company man. Serwer did play a touch of defense, admitting that he’s entertaining offers outside the magazine world.

Huey’s power at Time Inc. has been diluted recently, when a management restructuring redistributed the titles that he directly oversees.  Nelson, the highly respected former ME of People now oversees the very profitable “People Group” (made up of EW, People and InStyle). Bill Shapiro oversees the lifestyle group (various shelter titles including Real Simple) and Huey has the News group (Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated.) Shapiro and Nelson still technically report to Huey, but a former Time Inc staffer says “Martha has all the power now – she’s the only one with succesful magazines.”

Apart from the real success of Real Simple, InStyle and People, the once august publisher founded by Henry Luce has recently lost a lot of value in the eyes of Wall Street. And while rumors of a spin-off from the Time Warner mothership persist, Huey continues to avoid direct criticism. A recent BusinessWeek column by Jon Fine posited the Time Inc problem’s thusly:

“The current environment for selling all of Time Inc. is terrible. And before you sell, you’d want to know how much of the current bad news comes from a temporary ad downturn and how much comes from permanent structural change in the media world.”

A germane concept, but curiously absent is any notion of questionable (bad?) management decisions. The page counts of former industry stalwarts like Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated are pamphlet-esque. Is the Time empire burning? If so, why is no one pointing out that Emperor Huey has no clothes? A Google News search for “John Huey” reveals only corporate press releases, passing mentions or glowing reviews.

A number of insiders suggest that the real reason John Huey has gotten a pass from the media is that he’s a notorious leak to the press. No reporter wants to anger him for fear of losing a generous source. A 2006 New York Magazine profile written by Kurt Andersen is titled “The Good Old Boy of Time Inc.”

The Time Inc. ship has brought on a lot of water under the helm of Huey, and no one seems to be willing to report that the Titanic is sinking. Perhaps the old boy network extends beyond the hallowed halls of Time Inc.

UPDATE – Keith Kelly reports today that John Korpics has been named Creative Director to Fortune, replacing outgoing Design Director Robert Perino.

(Disclosure – my wife Geraldine Hessler worked under John Korpics in the Entertainment Weekly Art Department from ’98 to 00, then replaced him as Design Director, a title she held until 2008.)

That, of course, was before A.I.G. F.P., led by Joseph Cassano, became, as Lewis puts it, “the most receptive dumping ground for new risks created by big Wall Street firms.” It was also before practically everyone who worked there barely escaped a pogrom once A.I.G. turned into a $182.5 billion taxpayer liability.

Perhaps the biggest clue of what was to come was the unit’s DNA. A.I.G. F.P. was created in 1987 by alumni of the Beverly Hills junk bond giant Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was forced into bankruptcy amid scandal three years later and whose leader, Michael Milken, was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud. If Drexel were the first Friday the 13th movie, A.I.G. F.P. was one of those sequels in which Jason returns more powerful and hellish than ever.

Lewis does not provide an especially new answer to the question he poses at the outset: What exactly caused A.I.G.’s downfall? But he does present a nuanced look at the trading unit most people now realize was the culprit. (He also suggests, oddly but provocatively, that Eliot Spitzer, as New York’s hyper-kinetic attorney general, may have hastened the crisis by forcing the resignation of A.I.G. kingpin Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, who was arguably the only person who understood how the crazy-quilt financial company he put together really worked.)

What’s especially noteworthy about Lewis’s article is that F.P.’s money managers spoke to him; stunningly, they claimed no one else in the media had come knocking. And they all insist that there was no fraud at the unit – just a bad manager (Cassano) who made disastrous financial investments he may or may not have understood. For the record, as it were, Lewis granted most of them anonymity, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem; the whole crackdown on anonymous sources – “anonymice,” as Slate’s Jack Shafer calls them – seems increasingly like debating how many angels can fit on a pinhead, given the parlous state of the newspaper industry.

Considering the mess newspapers find themselves in, the remarkable thing about Lewis’s take is that it ran at all. It’s no small relief to find important financial stories like this in one of the glossiest of glossies. And for that we might thank the late Condé Nast Portfolio, strange as that might seem. (Disclosure: I was, depending on how you counted, Employee No. 2 or 4 at Portfolio, where I lasted 18 months.)

Today, Vanity Fair has perhaps the best magazine stable of financial writers around – besides Lewis, its roster includes Bethany McLean, Bryan Burrough (who, with John Helyar, wrote Barbarians at the Gate), and Michael Wolff, who understands business more deeply than most media writers. That agglomeration of talent is no accident.

Even though Portfolio was shuttered recently, Si Newhouse and other higher-ups at Condé Nast had at one point thought there was a big enough hole in existing coverage that it wagered – and lost – at least $100 million. That conviction got people’s attention inside as well as outside of 4 Times Square.

Graydon Carter, VF’s editor in chief, was never one to wonk out when it came to financial stories. Yes, Vanity Fair has over the years provided a steady stream of often very knowing business articles, but, clearly, Carter didn’t see that as a big part of his mandate; some of the business writers on his payroll told me that he was an especially hard sell. (Similar complaints were leveled at the New Yorker’s David Remnick, who was described to me as bored by business stories back when Portfolio was being hatched.)

Then along came Portfolio, which billed itself early on as “the Vanity Fair of Business.” Ferociously competitive, Carter set about shoring up VF’s business coverage. He also stocked up on prominent financial writers, grabbing McLean from Fortune and Lewis from Portfolio.

Now, with economic news front and center, VF has a formidable lineup churning out some of the best long-form business journalism around. McLean had a similarly sophisticated piece on Fannie Mae a few months earlier.

That may not be Portfolio’s only legacy, but even if it were, it’s a pretty good one.

Jim Impoco is a New York-based writer and a former editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and deputy editor of Portfolio. This is the first of occasional posts on Mediaite about the financial press. Please send tips or comments to jimpoco@mediaite.com.