Redesign Tops Off Changes at Money

The first thing you notice about the new and improved Money is that the magazine’s October cover folds out to an extra panel in width, the same way that Vanity Fair’s cover sometimes expands to reveal young Hollywood stars in varying degrees of undress. But Money uses its extra space to show off stars of the gyrating Dow--Jim Cramer, Abby Cohen, Peter Lynch and seven other seriously attired wizards who make up its “Ultimate Investment Club” and who discuss (inside) how they’re responding to the market upheavals.

Money, the 1.9-million-circulation giant of the exploding personal-finance category, has undergone its first full make-over in eight years. The cleaner, more sophisticated look unveiled in the new issue, complete with modified logo, is the work of respected magazine designers Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard. It’s a big step in updating a brand name of publishing.

“It’s true that there certainly was nothing broken,” says managing editor Robert Safian. “The basic idea is that I want to speak to the reader that Money has now.”

Safian, who was new to Money when he took over Jan. 1, says he encountered a difference between who the magazine’s audience is, and who it was thought to be. “The perception in the media community is that Money was more down-market than it was,” he explains. Rather, as recent research showed, the median income of its 1.7 million subscribers is $84,000, with investment portfolios with a median value of $140,000.

The redesign would appear to culminate--at least for now--one of the bigger editorial shake-ups of the last year. It began with the announcement last fall that Time Inc.’s editor in chief, Norman Pearlstine, was moving Safian, who had spent less than a year directing Fortune’s personal-finance coverage, to replace Frank Lalli, Money’s managing editor since 1989. In an organizational quirk, Safian reports to Fortune managing editor John Huey, who has won praise in media circles for enlivening his once-stodgy magazine.

Still, an exodus of senior Money staffers followed the Safian appointment.

Safian, 34, who had been an editor at the American Lawyer and SmartMoney, hired former Wall Street Journal veteran John Helyar, coauthor of the bestseller “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco” (HarperCollins), as a senior writer. Other bylines that now appear in Money include those of respected money-watchers Joseph Nocera, James Grant, William Green and Jean Sherman Chatzky.

“It’s been a wild year,” Safian says.

While underscoring Money’s core mission--”we’re a service magazine on how to invest and spend wisely”--Safian nevertheless has uprooted two of its evergreen features. Money did not publish an annual college guide in the September issue, because, Safian says, “people don’t decide on a college based on where it shows up on the list.” College assessments remain available in U.S. News & World Report and elsewhere; Money, instead, offers in its October issue a piece on “how to get your fair share” of college financial aid.

Gone, too, may be the annual ranking of the best and worst places to live, which was dramatically scaled back in July.

“The personal-finance category is very hot, given what the stock market has been doing,” says Martin S. Walker, a magazine consultant who is chairman of Walker Communications in New York.

Walker also says he believes that Money has reason to be concerned about the strides of SmartMoney. The latter monthly, launched six years ago as a joint venture of Dow Jones & Co. and Hearst Corp., has a growing circulation (724,000) that is still less than half that of Money, but it has carved out a solid niche among upscale readers.

“Money always has been more of a mass-market book,” Walker notes.

Also in the personal-finance mix are Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, 1 million circulation; Mutual Funds, 742,000; Worth, 541,000, and Bloomberg Personal Finance, 193,000.

Mutual Funds, purchased in May by Time Inc. as part of a larger deal, also introduces a redesign in its October issue.

Not Quite Yet: Two big books that were due this fall have been delayed. “All Too Human,” the political memoir of George Stephanopoulos, has been bumped from November to next spring. Little, Brown & Co. said Wednesday that the former aide to President Clinton wants to integrate more material about the recent release of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report.

Edmund Morris’ “Dutch,” a biographical memoir of Ronald Reagan that the author has been working on for 13 years, will miss its expected October release and instead come out in December. A Random House spokesman said Wednesday that Morris, who enjoyed enviable access to Reagan while he was president, was “still tinkering.”

The Stephanopoulos memoir, which commanded a $3-million advance, is described in his publisher’s fall catalog as “an irreverent and intimate portrait of how the nation’s business is conducted by people whose egos and idiosyncrasies are not sturdier than anyone else’s.” Stephanopoulos, now an ABC News commentator and a critic of Clinton’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair, plans to tour widely to promote the book.

Morris reportedly agreed to an advance of $3.3 million when Random House signed him in 1985. In the fall issue of Forbes FYI, a supplement sent to Forbes subscribers, Morris has a piece in which he jokes that people have asked him more than 726 billion times when his book is coming out. (His wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris, spent 15 years writing her biography of Clare Boothe Luce, “Rage for Fame.”)

Morris goes on to reveal that, on average, he interviewed Reagan once a month in the White House but did not develop much intimacy with him. As the writer puts it, “His smiling aloofness served him as well in biographical encounters as at superpower summits: If Gorby couldn’t bat one past him, what chance the authorized scribe?”

Morris ended up turning in a manuscript of 1,457 pages.

Guest Editors: Who’s Next? One of the stronger and more curious trends in magazine publishing is the use of so-called guest editors. It’s a way for a magazine to get a jolt of celebrity energy and promotional value.

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese did a guest shot not long ago at Civilization, the high-tone magazine of the Library of Congress; designer Bill Blass follows by guest-editing its August-September issue. He’s on the cover (“The Style Around Us”), and inside he identifies those he considers the 50 most stylish people of the century, including Gary Cooper, Brooke Astor, Sidney Poitier and, yes, Tina Turner.

Bill Bradley, the former senator and former New York Knick, is guest-editing the November issue of Sport magazine, which will carry an excerpt from his upcoming book, “Values of the Game” (Artisan), and showcase philanthropic sports figures and organizations. The November issue also will introduce Sport’s larger-format size and heavier paper stock.

Still to come--among others, no doubt--is Susan Sarandon, who will top the masthead of Marie Claire’s January issue. The politically active actress said in a recent statement that she’s hoping to pull together an issue “that will reflect my beliefs and interests.” Actress Gwyneth Paltrow edited last January’s issue.

McCourt and McCourt: Frank McCourt is writing a sequel to his mega-hit memoir “Angela’s Ashes” (Scribner) and says he won’t read brother Malachy McCourt’s bestselling memoir “A Monk Swimming” (Hyperion) until he’s done. In the meantime, Frank sounds a tad chagrined that Malachy’s book has come out. “Of course, I mind,” Frank recently told the Observer in London. “He’s written about things I’m going to be writing about. I’m a bit pissed off, sure.”

* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.