From the article in today’s New York Times about a new advertising campaign by Condé Nast:

The theme of the effort, produced by a new agency in San Francisco named Heat, is “The point of passion,” underlined by vignettes of ardent readers hugging, cuddling and snuggling with their Condé Nast favorites. The goal is to promote the ability of magazines to forge strong emotional bonds with readers, and by extension, of magazine ads to form similarly potent connections with consumers.

From the article in today’s New York Post about Star overlord Bonnie Fuller’s potential hiring of political consultant Howard Wolfson:

[I]nsiders say Wolfson’s real assignment would be to burnish Fuller’s reputation, which was golden as she rode rising circulation at Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Us Weekly, but dimmed when Star magazine tumbled and stalled. Fuller is in the second year of a multimillion-dollar contract, and some observers say she wants to buff her image before the contract expires.

Maybe Fuller could reverse her magazine’s declining fortunes, and therefore her own, by following Condé Nast’s lead:

[Adding this to the archives…]

In July 2003, soon after lowbrow genius Bonnie Fuller fled the editorship of Us Weekly to become the editorial director of American Media, then-Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers wrote, “I’m fully convinced that Fuller’s ultimate goal at US was to make the magazine intelligible to the completely illiterate. That said, she’s presumably being brought into American Media to turn Star and possibly the National Enquirer, The Globe and Weekly World News into serious journalistic endeavors—inasmuch as they feasibly can be serious journalistic endeavors.” Elizabeth concluded her post by suggesting that readers send in mockups of a smartened-up Star and an even-more-dumbed-down Us Weekly.

I had a few hours free that night, so I launched QuarkXPress and took a shot at designing a smartened-up Star. Here’s what I came up with (and Elizabeth published it the next day):