E-mails crisscrossed through alternative newsrooms all over the country, with the requisite chatter about this being a “dark day” for the industry. Oh, really? A pet products company — Hartz Mountain — fills its shopping cart with start-ups and going concerns in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Orange County, Calif., and Long Island, N.Y., over a period of years. Then it notices there’s a lot of stupid money out there and decides to dump its properties while the getting is good. It’s good old fashioned American business, writ large over what used to be a bunch of grubby upstart rags but that are now increasingly in the habit of rigorously covering pressing lifestyle issues like finding the best gym to work out in. Where’s the tragedy?

The papers in question include two of the best known in the industry (the Village Voice and the L.A. Weekly) and five others, either suburban offshoots of the flagship papers or recently purchased titles in the hinterlands: the Long Island Voice, the Orange County Weekly, the Seattle Weekly, the Minneapolis City Pages and the Cleveland Free Times.

The chicken-littling comes from worries about exactly what sort of golem of evil will come riding over the horizon and pony up the $150 million to $200 million for a company that claims $80 million in annual revenues. Could it be New Times, a chain of 10 brawling weeklies, mostly in the West and South? The company has a big appetite — it’s been scrapping with Stern for papers for much of the last three or four years — but maybe not that much stupid money. Or will a large daily chain decide to stop banging its head on the wall trying to catch the attention of rich young audiences and just buy a place at the table instead? Just a few years ago, daily ownership was the industry bugaboo. Now, in this sudden age of ceaseless vertical and horizontal integration, there’s a new bogeyman: Could a daily publishing company use a weekly’s street cred as jewelry to hang on its local portals?

If it’s a dark day, it’s not the first. Times Mirror, which is mentioned among current suitors of the Stern holdings, paid $17.5 million last April for New Mass Media, a Connecticut chain of five alternative weeklies led by the Hartford Advocate. The company also owns the Hartford Courant, a daily that the Advocate continues nominally to compete with. The sky did not fall. Last summer, there was a movement at the convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies to kick the New Mass Media papers out of the association because of their new affiliation with the dark side. The effort failed, in part because people in the industry have begun to see that opposing daily co-option of their respective franchises is congruent with the industry’s squishy lefty traditions, but doesn’t comport with the behavior of the invisible hand. Mass media will continue to, well, mass.

David Schneiderman, president of Stern Publishing, wasn’t publicly ruling out any buyers. (Although he did privately tell his staff that there would be no deal with New Times. A New Times source said that the company will be in the mix and “Stern will sell to the highest bidder, period.” Right now, the two companies compete directly in Los Angeles, where the tiny New Times Los Angeles goes up against the very large L.A. Weekly, and in Cleveland, where Stern’s Free Times is in a weekly jihad with the Scene of New Times.)

“I don’t have any great problem with a daily newspaper company if they are willing to leave the papers alone and finance good journalism by continuing to write the checks … I think you will see some interesting players coming out of the woodwork,” Schneiderman says. Stern is selling, according to Schneiderman, because none of his children are interested in spending their careers driving the bright shiny little media company he has assembled.

“I think you have to assume that there was a shrewd business calculation in the decision to sell the papers that goes beyond the fact that Leonard Stern’s children are not interested in running the papers,” says Richard Meeker, publisher of Willamette Week in Portland, Ore. He’s got a point. The altie news niche is relatively small: Revenues last year in the aggregate were $437 million. (A single daily in the Midwest — the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis — sold last year for $1.4 billion.) But it’s a niche that kicks out respectable profits and continues to accrete a tribe of young, spendy consumers.

Of course, these days, those people are accessing arts and entertainment data, deciding where to buy a futon and dating each other via a variety of media formats. This makes an Internet play for Stern seem logical. Daily newspaper giant Knight Ridder recently launched a national network of local portals. Its president, Dan Finnigan, told Editor & Publisher that he is “obsessed with being the No. 1 property of Web users in local markets.” Although the altie industry has been as slow or slower on the digital uptake than its daily brethren, Stern Publishing has been very aggressive in extending its brand into digital realms. (The company recently registered the domain name “NakedCity.com” — you can fill in the blanks at home.) It’s also well established in cities where Knight Ridder has no presence. Stern’s Voice site alone has 2.6 million page views a month, which is a lot of eyes for a local publication.

TicketMaster Online-City Search and America Online, both of which are investing heavily in local portals, might view a Stern buy as a way to mature in a hurry. But would the Stern papers’ rigorous, hyper-vigilant cultural coverage go squishy under an electronic ownership paradigm? And the staffs of both the L.A. Weekly and the Voice (where there is an active union), which have had their share of fights with current owners and have a major issue with corporate America in general, might present a little bit of a management challenge to some Lord of the Net who expects content providers to know their place.

“I think it would be interesting to see what a digital company might do with this kind of property, but it could end up in some interesting ethical dilemmas,” says Steve Outing, who covers interactive news media for Editor & Publisher. “CitySearch has worked to integrate the commerce components of their sites into the contextual editorial content. I wonder how readers might react.”

Internet publishing consultant Mark Potts doesn’t see a sensible endgame in a Web play, especially in the wake of the butt-whipping Microsoft Sidewalk received after a well-funded assault on local markets.

“I can’t really buy the premise. I can see the fit, kind of, but I don’t think either [CitySearch or AOL] wants to be in the newspaper publishing business. I mean, what are they going to do, buy them looking for the electronic components and then shut down the print side?”

Indeed, this could be the saddest thing of all. A sensible Net company might view this collection of once-cutting-edge content as just a little fustian. A buyer may not see them as community assets, but as one more component of the bottom line. At best, Stern will get for his prize properties an amount that represents the mere stock fluctuations of many Internet brand names.

Mature digital companies are used to seeing profit margins in the 30 and 40 percent range. Many other start-ups make no money at all, but are capitalized in the jillions on the basis of their potential. Although a lot of weeklies make a lot of money selling all those futon ads, most sport net revenues under 20 percent and the cash flow they kick up is not meaningful to an industry engorged on IPOs.

Others suggest that a cabal of Wall Street investors might come together for their own play, or that perhaps a European company looking for a point of entry in the hot American media market might think that Stern is a good place to start.

Russ Smith, founder and editor of the New York Press, rightly takes credit for going up against the Village Voice and slapping it around with impunity. Norman Mailer and a few buddies created the Voice out of chicken wire and gum back in the 1950s, and it minted money on ads and newsstand and subscription sales for decades — until Smith and Co., with its free venture forced the paper to stop charging in New York. And he couldn’t care less who he terrorizes next.

“To me, it’s Darwinism. I don’t give a fuck,” Smith says. “The industry is so bad anyway, it couldn’t get worse … A reporter asked me, ‘Aren’t you afraid of a Times Mirror, say, with deep pockets, as competition?’ I say, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Like Leonard Stern doesn’t have deep pockets? I am thrilled by the whole thing.”

But although Stern’s main business was keeping Spot in flea collars, he seemed to understand the fundamental imperatives of the alt-weekly racket, which can be loosely stated as, “Let those freaks down in the newsroom write what they want. We’ll find a way to sell it.”

Other potential buyers who didn’t grow up in an industry full of ex-hippies who were having fun making a paper and accidentally got rich may not understand that it is in their business interest to keep kicking the Man in the shins. Even if they are the Man.

“I think the danger is that the people who are going to buy it aren’t going to understand that to succeed in this business, you have to let a thousand idiosyncrasies bloom. I can’t think of a lot of large media companies who see the world that way,” says Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.

Patty Calhoun, editor of New Times Westword in Denver and president of the association, says, “The previous owner was pretty hands off, and I’m sure the editors and writers are wondering if they will be able to continue to do the kind of work they have been doing.”

In an internal memo notifying the worker bees that they were for sale, Schneiderman harked back to the days of free love by saying, “Stern Publishing is ultimately about you.” Yeah, baby.

Burl Gilyard is one of the “yous” it’s all about. He works as a staff writer at Stern-owned City Pages in Minneapolis-St. Paul. “The outcome could be good, bad, or neutral, but it’s no fun working under a cloud of corporate uncertainty,” Gilyard says. So what possible good could come of it? “I guess there’s always Times Mirror stock options.”

Still, Bloomberg’s interest in public service is pretty hard-core. He has served on a raft of important boards and has been giving away fistfuls of money from the very beginning of his career. He is a magnificent Alger-esque cliché the American entrepreneur with a single idea so powerful that it laid its own tracks to dominance. But his autonomy in an age of publicly traded, vertically (and horizontally) integrated behemoths has left him unable to grow much beyond providing financial data. And that’s not enough for Bloomberg: The real reason he’s looking toward the public sector is that he’s on the verge of being bored stiff.

You could tell as much when he appeared in a chat with Charlie Rose at the Reality Bytes Television/Internet conference last month in New York. He was vivid and almost statesmanlike every time he showed a little leg concerning his nascent — albeit still unannounced — mayoral campaign. And even though he did a great job of representing the corporate brand, the fiery entrepreneur eager to slay all comers was not much in evidence. “I believe in term limits, not just for people in government, but for everybody,” he told the audience.

That’s because he won the battle and doesn’t have the assets to fight the war. Domestically, his core business is still soaring. Bloomberg L.P.’s terminals — the first truly convergent devices to provide financial analytics, marketing, value-added news and transactability in one idiosyncratic but user-friendly machine — cost Dow Jones & Co. hundreds of millions as it invested in a competitor, the black hole formerly known as Telerate. True, in the financial world, the company still competes with global leader Reuters, but it dominates in the U.S., where more than half of its 155,000 terminals are installed. Charging $1,285 per terminal per month, the company has revenues growing at 15 percent per year. They’re now approaching $2.3 billion a year, with margins in the high teens. Bloomberg told Rose that the biggest mistake he has made was not hiring enough new people; the company has brought on 1,000 employees over the past year, bringing its workforce to 7,000.

So is Michael Bloomberg fleeing the bear? Not likely. The utility of his terminals goes up as the market becomes more complicated, even though the proprietary “Bloomberg” seems an anomaly in a post-Web age. “Inertia,” he told me at the conference, now favors his company. “We are in a business where the bigger my installed base, the more attractive it is to the next customer.” That’s a truism that has turned his data terminals into a closed loop in the financial community akin to America Online’s stranglehold on the consumer market. But just as AOL felt a need to reach out and merge into a multiplatformed future, Bloomberg can’t achieve his broader ambitions without selling or merging his company, both of which he says he’s loath to do.

He made a good run at it. In order to expand his company — and keep himself engaged — Bloomberg decided to build out his media empire back in the early ’90s. He now owns and operates a news service with 79 bureaus and 1,000 reporters worldwide; a New York radio station, with attendant nationally distributed financial programming; a slew of magazines, including Bloomberg Personal Finance; and a cable television network. But the media franchise still functions more as a marketing arm for the core business than as a separate enterprise. According to industry sources, 90 percent of the revenues and 95 percent of the profits still come from the low-bandwidth boxes. And an aggregating radio market and an increasingly monolithic cable, broadcast and satellite television industry mean that Bloomberg can’t get the kind of carriage that’s going to allow him to become anything more than a boutique player in the info-space.

A friend of mine who was also a very successful player as a data provider got out a few years ago when he saw the writing on a very big wall. “After a while, you begin to see that scale is all that’s going to matter in the end. You can go very fast and build really smart, but you can’t beat scale. I’m sure Mike is frustrated that there are other, bigger companies that control the pipes, but there is really no way to beat them other than joining them.”

Thus cornered, Bloomberg appears to be planning his endgame. He has already taken himself off the board of his company; on the dais with Rose, he spoke openly of letting go of operational control as well. He recently reassigned all of his top lieutenants for a month so that they could get a look at different sides of the business and introduce a little controlled chaos into the organization to test-drive his absence. After his presentation, he talked about why Bloomberg the company could survive without Bloomberg the man.

“If you want to walk out, rather than be carried out, you have to leave at a time when people are saying, How can you walk away? Well, I’m not leaving the company, unless I ran for mayor and won, yes, I suppose. But you have to be willing to turn things over to others.”

Of course, no one can kick Bloomberg out of his shop. Merrill Lynch owns 20 percent, and small chunks are divided among the half-dozen people who were involved in the start-up. The rest is his. And that autocratic status brings with it certain risks. Several sexual-harassment suits alleged that working at Bloomberg L.P. combined the least charming attributes of the trading floor and the locker room. And while the relentless work ethic seems normal when you’re there, several refugees compare life at Bloomberg to a digital gulag, with constant pressure to produce and update stories for which deadlines are sometimes measured in seconds.

But most of the employees pledge fealty to their “Uncle Mike,” and the turnover rate is less than 10 percent. “They turn down the lights during the orientation, and the chip gets embedded pretty deep,” says one reporter, by way of explaining her happiness. Walking around one of 22 floors on Park Avenue, it’s hard not to be affected by the osmotics of the place. The fish in the gorgeously appointed aquariums in the lobby are not the only species at Bloomberg that have come to see their little world as a beginning and end. Flat hierarchy, ample snacks and good money keep people pounding away deep into the night.

Bloomberg’s corporate benevolence gives him levers he would never have in the public sector. He probably can’t make a quarter-million municipal employees work harder, and he isn’t going to be able to pay them more at a time when tax revenues will likely be declining. The political life means a level of accountability that Bloomberg has never endured. When the boss pops off about this or that at a private company, which Bloomberg is wont to do, there are no public shareholders calling for his head.

It would be dumb to count him out, because he’s made a career out of making his skeptics look like fools. He’s a man who, in spite of his bluster, seems to understand his limits and manage around them with surprising deftness. You can bet that he won’t run if he doesn’t think he can win — he’s not that bored, and a few more things have to fall into place before he becomes convinced. A “Bloomberg” is a have-to-have for financial players because it’s as close as you can get to predicting the future. Unfortunately for its creator, there isn’t such a device for politics. Bloomberg told the audience that there isn’t a single job in business that he wants beyond the one he has, so he can either hunker down or take a flyer. Even though 75 percent of New Yorkers don’t even know who he is, look for him to take the Bloomberg brand to the one place — politics — where it has little salience.

Don’t pull up to the checkout line looking for “Sex Tricks He’s Never Seen Before: The outrageous ‘rock’ technique and 21 other moves that will make his thighs go up in flames” (free instruction cards included). You also won’t find cover lines like “Supersize Your Sex Life: Take home 10 tasty tips from the world’s lustiest lovers. Trust us, he’ll never get his fill of you.” And forget about seeing come-ons like “The Bedroom Trick That Will Blow Him Away (All you need is a hair scrunchie).” Instead, there are tips to “Make Him Crave You” and “Turn Him On Like Crazy” and for finding “Deeper, Sweeter Love.”

This newfound primness is going around. Condé Nast Publications’ Glamour — edited by former Cosmo editor and “mother of all damp cover lines” Bonnie Fuller — is proceeding delicately as well. Last February, it was all right there for the grabbing: “Let’s Talk About Sex — 23 Erotic Ways to Make Sex With Him Sweeter” and the clinically salacious “Sex and Size: Is He Too Big? Are You? How to Maximize Your Pleasure Match.” This year, it’s the wan “Delicious Details: Men on Their Biggest Turn-On Secrets, PLUS How to Misbehave to Make Horizontal Even Hotter.” Horizontal? In this pristine new world, “sexy” is fine, “sexiest” can still get a ride, but “sex” — as a word connoting the nasty — is out. True, it’s degrees of difference, but that’s what separates bloomers from flame-red thong underwear.

Over the last six months, the two magazines — which had been in an arms race over cover lines that had all the linguistic subtlety of a gynecological exam — have defaulted to “Whoa Baby” romance novel motifs. Naked Kama Sutra tantric sex is now under the covers while orgasms have been banished to the magazine’s boudoir. Instead, “Be an Amazing Kisser” gets Cosmo’s G spot of cover positions (the upper left corner). Even the feisty Jane magazine decided to quit making throaty noises on its cover midway through last year. What gives here? Have the impulses of women magazine buyers suddenly become more chaste?

Not likely. When publishers change their behavior, it’s a safe bet that common sense, or common standards of decency, isn’t on the table — money is. Fuller, first at Cosmo and then at Glamour, proved she could move magazines with can’t-resist cover lines offering randy advice about “His & Her Pleasure Triggers” and “Tricks for Outstanding Orgasms.” Single-copy sales went up 8.8 percent in her first full year as editor in 1999 at a time when most magazines were hurting bad at the newsstand. And Cosmo stayed very hot, trumpeting “Sex-clusives” and “His Secret Sex Spots” to keep up with its former editor.

But all the hyperbole left both magazines with very little room to work. Once you’re over the top, what’s next? “I think that beyond the ‘ick’ factor, there is a boredom factor,” says Elizabeth Crow, editorial director of Rodale’s Women’s Health Group, a former CEO at Gruner + Jahr USA and a former editor in chief of Mademoiselle. “Once you’ve found out how to supersize your sex life four different ways, the fifth is not all that interesting.”

Ennui has set in at the newsstand. Cosmo’s newsstand sales were off 9.9 percent for the second half of 2000 compared with the same period in 1999, with the magazine losing almost 200,000 single-copy sales. Sell-through, a measure of how many of the magazines on the stand actually get purchased, dropped from 67 percent to 65 percent in 2000. Glamour was down 10.9 percent for the same period, with sell-through off a percentage point as well. Eroding single-copy sales can hamper some titles, but it’s a killer for supermarket behemoths like Cosmo and Glamour. Cosmo currently sells 1.8 million of its 2.6 million paid copies on the newsstand, while Glamour retails half a million of its 2.1 million circulation.

There may be another factor cutting into these magazines’ newsstand sales and prompting the more demure come-ons — insistent pressure from interest groups. In the past two years, several supermarket chains, including Kroger’s and Big Y, have put Cosmo, and in some cases Glamour, behind opaque blinders that obscure everything except the name of the title. Last month, Giant Food Inc. joined the crusade and obscured the cover of Cosmo. “We have had complaints for some time that people don’t consider these magazines appropriate for display at the checkout counter and we thought putting the blinders up seemed like a good opportunity to address concerns while still continuing to offer the publication for sale,” says Barry Scher, spokesman for Giant.

Groups like the American Decency Association and Morality in Media have suggested for years that the presence of bottomless cleavage and come-hither cover language was rending the fabric of American culture. And the retailers, after hearing their concerns — and those of random customers who don’t like explaining the word “foreplay” to a 4-year-old — have covered the magazines up or pushed them into the back of the store. According to the Web site of the American Decency Association, over two dozen supermarket chains have agreed to alter the display of the magazines. And as anybody can tell you, putting the cover lines of a women’s magazine out of sight is a great way to deprive them of oxygen.

“There’s been a bit of shift, but it doesn’t satisfy us,” says Bill Johnson, president of the American Decency Association. “The checkout counter should be a safe haven … somebody has to speak out guarding the hearts and minds of our young ladies.”

You’d think that big, bodacious titles like Cosmo would be able to throw their hips around a bit, but given the general mayhem at the newsstand — the disintegrating distribution chain and wholesaler consolidation — it’s not a great time to get in a cat fight with retailers.

“I think that in every regard, retailers have more leverage than they have ever had with magazines,” says Chip Block, a Ziff Davis Media publishing strategist.

Robert Castardi of Curtis Circulation still isn’t thrilled to see some of his biggest sellers messing with tried-and-true formulas. “I am concerned about compromising editorial or cover lines to satisfy the concerns of the retailer if it is suggested by anything other than the consumer,” he says, “because in the long run, it’s the consumer that we are trying attract.”

It’s not as if the Glazmo niche has changed its editorial focus in fundamental ways. The March issue of Cosmo suggests “My Boyfriend’s Clueless About My Three Secret Lovers.” But there probably won’t be any more “Supersize Your Sex Life” as there was last March. But when you’re talking about formulas that have been endlessly tested and market proven, even a little tweaking can create a lot of mayhem. (In 1999, the word “sex” appeared in 10 out of 12 upper-left-corner headlines in Cosmo.)

In spite of the fact that the linguistic disarmament is an observable fact — it’s sitting there in plain sight at most checkout lines — corporate and editorial types at both Hearst and Condé Nast all seemed suddenly chaste and unapproachable when called about the change in cover nomenclature. They prefer to hide in the skirts of the Magazine Publishers Association, proffering a statement it gave Inside in the summer about the importance of free speech and editorial integrity. (Glamour’s got a great reason to keep its head down. It’s gotten covered up in some of the grocery stores, but Cosmo remains the hottie that most decency groups, like the American Decency Association and Morality in Media, would like to stone to death.)

In keeping with the general candor of her publication, only Jane Pratt, editor in chief of Fairchild Publications’ Jane, was willing to take a call. She was more than happy to report that halfway through 2000, the magazine’s editors quit talking dirty, coverspeak-wise.

“There’s no question that we have toned down the cover lines,” Pratt says. In the wake of the sale in 1999 of the magazine from the image-conscious Walt Disney Co. to Advance Communications, which owns Fairchild and Condé Nast, Pratt said that she decided to try on some sexier cover dresses. So last March brought “The Great Vibrator Hum-Off,” while “How to operate his equipment better than he can” showed up on the June/July cover.

“We were given the opportunity to push things more, so we did,” says Pratt. But “the readers didn’t like it and told us so. They thought it was lowbrow, something that they wouldn’t be proud of having out on the coffee table.” Pratt also acknowledges that “the advertisers were relieved to see us go back to less salacious cover lines.”

Pratt says reining in some of the sexual frankness would have been more difficult “if our newsstand numbers doubled, but they didn’t.” So, the “Horny? Quick solution on page 94″ that made a turn in the May 2000 issue won’t be coming back for any encores. And Pratt isn’t concerned about getting tarred with the same brush that frantic decency groups are slinging at many magazines in the women’s space, including middle-of-the-road efforts like Redbook.

“I have never heard it suggested that some of these groups are out to ban the whole genre,” she says. But if a few of the magazines coveting that young woman reader get pushed out of the supermarket line, Pratt, and undoubtedly quite a few others, stand ready to take their place. “To be honest, I’m very competitive, so I thought if they move some of those other magazines to the back of the store, we might get to move up front.”

For decades, the glossies — the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and her ugly
sisters — owned the franchise for collecting money from the purveyors of the
stylish and vestigial; newspapers had to content themselves with real estate
voyeurism as an adjunct to their classifieds. Of course, there was a time when
dailies dipped into glossy pretension with their Sunday magazines, but these have
gradually attenuated as the mega-spending department stores have increasingly
favored their own glossified inserts. Even the vaunted Sunday New York Times Magazine is
looking a little anorexic, pummeled by the competition from all corners of the
mag world.

But now the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal and the New York Times’ Sunday
Styles section have suddenly become less traditional newspaper sections than
broadsheet catalogs, ink-stained bastions of yuppie porn configured to create
desire.

Newsprint has a peculiar attribute: While the current crop of men’s and
women’s magazines will clearly do anything to push product, there is an
assumption that staid old print is concerned with higher, calmer matters. Like
the cheaply printed fliers for the cheaply priced hardware store, the medium
offers a message of reassurance. Each week, both papers set out in a slatternly
quest to find ever more expensive ways of getting married, mowing the lawn, or
putting things in your pie-hole. Only the Journal and the Times have the robust
demographics to make this gussied-up version of a blue-collar medium hum
like a $490 electric razor.

These daily mitzvahs for the recently wealthy are themselves fat and happy. The
Times stumbled hard with the launch of a daily Styles section a few years back,
but found its stride with daily consumer sections about gadgets, food and
housewares. WSJ’s Weekend Journal, a Friday sonnet to the art of avarice launched
back in March 1998, is a massively successful extension of the Journal brand.
According to the July 12 Media Industry Newsletter, second-year revenues at
Weekend Journal section will total $34 million, 70 percent over the previous year
and far ahead of projections.

“Certain advertisers have always loved our demographic, but we didn’t have the
right environment for them. Weekend Journal is right for a lot of these guys. And
on the reader’s side, I think it’s clear we are meeting an important need, which
is what drives advertising,” says Richard Tofel, vice president of corporate
communications for Dow Jones and Co., which publishes the Journal.

Like power boats that seat only two people while costing more than most houses,
the newly enriched sections of this grubby medium offer
daily iterations of how many clueless knuckleheads have found themselves in
receipt of tall money that they have no idea what to do with. Forget the
millennium, isn’t one of the surest signs of the apocalypse that Armani and Gucci
are buying big girly ads to cuddle up betwixt the gray pinstripes of Journal
text?

“As a reader, I am thrilled to see [those ads],” says Joanne Lipman, Weekend
editor. “I think it adds a great deal to the paper. Our letters suggest, and this
is purely anecdotal, that Weekend is a family read, passed around by family
members. In some instances, it’s replacing their weekend metro paper, while
others compare it to a magazine.”

That sort of demographic-stretching is visible in “The Thomas Crown Affair,” in
which a post-coital Pierce Brosnan reads the “guy” sections of the Journal while a
still-hungry Rene Russo combs Weekend Journal in pursuit of further satisfaction.
The semiotics of the scene speak volumes.

Lipman says it’s dumb to suggest that Journal is simply pandering to the
basest instincts of its readers.

“Weekend Journal represents a natural evolution of where the Journal has been
going for the past 10 to 15 years. The line between business life and personal
life has become blurred, and I think that we understand the interplay between
business and culture. The impetus for our section is appealing to reader’s minds,
not just their pocketbooks. Some of our readers are very successful and have done
very well for themselves, but they are more than the sum of their pocketbooks.”

Lipman emphasizes that the journalistic standards that made the Journal a
reliable brand in the first place are firmly in place at Weekend, but how
rigorous can you be when you are writing about overpriced antique arcade games?

Newspaper sections didn’t always serve as obeisant Baedekers for yuppie scum.
It used to be that if you wanted to skim expensive tchotchkes, you’d spend the time
on the margins of the New Yorker magazine, finding both basic and frivolous goods
at impossible prices. Now, large parts of two of the nation’s biggest papers are devoted to
hat lore. Weekend Journal has a column on catalogs, meta-journalism for a
meta-consumeristic age. Do we really need instruction in how we should look at
the catalogs that come flying into our mailbox?

That’s not the point, as managing editor Paul R. Steiger un-self-conciously points
out in his Weekend Journal review of “Selling Dreams: How to Make Any Product
Irresistible,” written by the CEO of Ferrari’s North American unit.

“You must own the customer, make him aspire to possess your product until he has
it, and immediately want the next version after he does,” says Steiger,
paraphrasing the author. And there’s nothing like the name of a serious publication and
some august bylines to legitimize the fetishization of product. Both the Journal
and the Times suggest over and over that it’s OK to sink your net worth into
pointless doodads, as long as the doodads are quality.

Even when you drift out of the didactic place-your-money-here categories, the aroma of profligate commodification lingers — both papers get
damp panties in search of ever more expensive ways to engage basic human endeavors. In a recent Sunday Styles piece about “destination weddings,” it was suggested that if you
are in the marrying way, you might want to pick some difficult, hard-to-access
locale — not because you need to, but because you can.

To hell with mom and dad’s country club — why not, ah, Portugal? Amid the
all-night flamenco parties and the ponies with hydrangeas woven into their manes
– did I mention the Chateau Lafite hand-carried by some of the vineyard’s family
members making the scene? — the reporter and the newly betrothed conspire to
conjure fabulousness with smutty glee.

“The couple, both New Yorkers, have no family in Portugal, nor have they ever
lived there; they simply wanted an unusual and exotic location, and in this day
of casual jet travel — not to mention a galloping economy — the extravagance of
going to Europe for a long-weekend wedding did not seem far-fetched,” wrote
Monique P. Yazigi in the Times on July 11. “Who wants to go to another wedding at
the Pierre?” said the groom.

The answer is everybody else on the planet, except the swells who have been there
a jillion times. For that .0001 percent of the population, domestic
manifestations of out-of-hand wealth provoke a Gatsby-like shrug and a round of
so-what’s-next. That crowd alone, of course, wouldn’t be enough to fund a daily
newspaper section, but there’s an army of readers who don’t mind coveting someone
else’s fortune. (If more readers lingered over the pictures in the Weddings
feature at the back of the section, they might think twice about the pursuit of
wealth — rich people generally have very ugly children and they grow up to marry
other people’s ugly children.)

The wealthy will always be with us, but they seem more out of hand than Internet
IPOs. Turns out it’s a tough time to have money coming out your ass. Where else
to stuff it?

“I think people in high society get very bored. In order to challenge them and
make things very special and spectacular, it takes bringing them to a completely
new environment in order to blow their minds,” Polly Onet told Yazigi. She’s a
party planner, part of a whole class of pilot fish who live on the luxurious
underbelly of the bored rich and show up constantly in the Times.

In the same issue, there seemed to be evidence that the Times wasn’t always on
its gilded horse: a feature about the guy who started a thrifting magazine called
Cheap Date. But the magazine director didn’t come by bargain-hunting honestly.
Marlon Richards, it turns out, is the son of Keith Richards, whose annual earnings have
outstripped his habit for decades. The wannabe thrifters at the launch party
were variously described as: “the daughter of Yves Saint Larent’s muse,” a
Rothschild from the banking family, the bassist for Nancy Boy, a gaggle of
models and the son of a guy who loans his Martha’s Vineyard property to the
Clintons when they are in the neighborhood. “Do we have to dress cheap?” asked
Richards’ wife before they went to the launch party. Of course not, silly, you’re rich.

In addition to the human glitz, the Times objectifies everything in sight, a
practice that makes for some nice synergies. On July 11, Sunday Styles ran
something about how HBO’s “Sex in the City” is taking both the city and the
provinces by storm; the following Sunday, they wrote — in the shopping
column Pulse — about how the necklaces Sarah Jessica Parker wears are flying off the
shelves. It’s a trend loop that always ends in a price tag. In Style over
Substance, Frank Decaro etched the conundrum without a trace of irony. “Faced
with a glut of mass promotion and mass consumption, personal taste becomes the
life lifesaver, but it’s harder and harder to chart your own course.” Thank God
the Times is there so I can become the kind of rugged shopper-individualist who
will keep the paper knee-deep in Yves Saint Laurent ads.

All of these captions to consumerism require more dollar signs than periods,
and become a breathless run-on of price tags, price points and priceless moments.

The Times has made a week of it, with Dining Out, Circuits and House and
Home et al. Gadgets, gewgaws and the people that lust after them have become the
subject of legitimate editorial inquiry. The journalism that results doesn’t ever
get to some of the more important questions — like, say, who needs all this crap,
or whether thing-lust will be the kindling that sets our version of Rome afire
long after the blazing bull market dies out.

Jyll Holzman, senior vice president of advertising at the New York Times, says
that advertising growth at the paper in the Going-Going ’90s has been
“explosive.” After adding color and articulating more consumer-driven sections,
the Times has given glossier publications a run for all the money.

“We are truly a national newspaper. We have opened 150 markets for home delivery
and we are more than competitive with many magazines in terms of reaching a
desirable demographic. And we’ve had no trouble articulating that to the
advertisers,” she says.

By sanctifying desire with faux coverage, the readers of these moneyed sections
can shop guilt-free just inches away. The Times’ Sunday Pulse shopping column
nakedly revels in an age when the credit-card limit never comes into view. Why
have just have a cell phone? Why not shop for a stylish replacement frame replete
with antenna caps — just 10 minutes of installation and you can make a
statement, not just a phone call. You can always call your dog, according
to the adjoining item on July 25. Forty-two bucks gets your dog a night at
Paws Inn, where dogs romp freely with other dogs, leap on the furniture, watch
television, even take phone calls. When you’re actually out walking Fifi, you can depend on the Watcher ($9), a rear-view bracelet that helps the wearer spot
those lurking paparazzi in time to duck for shelter. And when you’re worn out
running from all those fans, there’s always Vinotherapie treatment, which
includes a barrel bath with fresh grape seed extracts, merlot wraps and
sauvignon-oil massages, at some impossibly fabulous vineyard in France.

Moral: Even if a paparazzi wouldn’t shoot you if you punched him in the nose, you
can still act like a celebrity, and so can your dog.

At Weekend Journal, all goods are equal. A refer down the side of the July 30
editions tugs you inside to find the “best” Adirondack chair, the “best” artist
of the century and the “best” deal on a Porsche Boxster, and to watch as novelist Tama
Janowitz searches for the “best” husband. Would you be surprised to learn that
his net worth plays a significant role in his qualitative rating? Acquisition
finds full throat in “Object of the Week”: One week it’s a pricey painted rarity
from the Hudson River School and the next, a vintage Good Humor truck. Who cares
if it’s gauche or glorious — if someone else wants it, you should want it too.

Everything is for sale: small-town life, faucets, a CD
player for your shower and the deep blue sea (filmed and actual). And just in
case the plethora of hard and soft goods gets your heart racing, you can track it
with the electronic stethoscope. And there’s wine. Wine to bath in, travel to, sniff,
deconstruct and, sometimes, actually drink. If some sassy little number turns the
heads of the Journal’s cuddly wine enthusiasts, just hop over to the adjoining ad and order from the Virtual Vineyard.

“What these two papers are doing is lending their greatest asset — journalistic
credibility — to the most profitable operation short of printing money that their
industry can imagine,” says Tom Frank, editor of the Baffler. “This is where the
payoff comes for all of those years of reputation building and
objectivity-inspired hair-splitting: Dump it all for a Porsche Boxster!”

Internet marketeers like Amazon and Tower have been accused of blurring the lines
between what constitutes an ad and what constitutes editorial, but other than
sectional conceits and a few column borders, the Journal and the Times present
one seamless buy-o-sphere. These aren’t leisure sections, they are newsprint
Brookstones where customers — there are no readers here — browse from kiosk to
kiosk for that one special something that will make them all feel special in
exactly the same way.