Year’s New Magazines Focus on Celebs, Latinos

More, Teen People, Brill’s Content and ESPN the Magazine were the big launches of 1998. This year, the major additions to America’s ever-crowded magazine racks will include StarStyle, Outdoor Explorer, and Talk, the monthly being edited by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown.

StarStyle, scheduled to go on sale Feb. 23, is a celebrity-focused spinoff of McCall’s and the first U.S. launch of a consumer title by Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing, a division of Bertelsmann.

“Since I started as editor in chief of McCall’s four years ago, I’ve increased the amount of celebrity coverage and readers have responded in a positive way,” said Sally Koslow, who is doubling as editorial director of StarStyle. “It seemed like the right moment now to focus exclusively on celebrities. We think it will turn into a magazine with a regular frequency, although we’ve committed to only two issues this year.”

Koslow added that one way StarStyle will distinguish itself, say, from InStyle, Time Inc.’s red-hot chronicle of celebrities at home and in great clothes, is by devoting up to one-third of its content to the glamour of early Hollywood. The first issue will recall the romance of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, whom Koslow described as “the quintessential model for the zany blond.”

In late April, Outdoor Explorer will be added to the burgeoning adventure-travel category by Times Mirror Magazines, whose lineup already includes Outdoor Life and the well-known Field & Stream. (Times Mirror Corp. also owns the Los Angeles Times.)

“Real Adventure, Real People” will be the tag line of Outdoor Explorer, which aims to serve those looking to camp, hike, bike, ski and such within a manageable distance from home. The magazine will come out three times this year before going bimonthly in 2000.

Later, the stewardship of Tina Brown doubtless will draw to Talk generous buzz and media interest that will help to separate the monthly general-interest magazine from the pack when it debuts in September. Since announcing unexpectedly in July that she was not renewing her contract as editor of the New Yorker--a development that generated six pages of coverage in Time--Brown has been staffing her publishing partnership with Miramax Films.

Jonathan Burnham, who has edited books in London and New York, is literary editor of Talk magazine and editor in chief and publisher of Miramax/Talk Media Books.

In addition, the rapidly growing population of Latino teenagers is being targeted by two other publishers.

MicroMedia Affiliates Inc., the publisher of New Jersey Monthly and Miami Metro, plans to launch Latingirl magazine on Jan. 19. On the cover of the premiere issue of the bimonthly is actress Rosario Dawson, who appeared last year in Spike Lee’s “He Got Game.”

Latingirl will be followed in March by the launch of a Spanish-language edition of Teen magazine. Petersen Cos. Inc., which publishes Teen, is partnering with Ideas Publishing Group, a Miami company that also does Spanish editions of Glamour and Newsweek.

One magazine that apparently will not be on this year’s schedule after all is a previously announced weekly edition of Us. The weekly edition of Wenner Media Inc.’s sexy celeb mag is not expected to arrive until next year, as Wenner looks to enlist a business partner before going up against the formidable People and Entertainment Weekly.

McAlary as Novelist: Mike McAlary’s first book, “Buddy Boys,” was about to be published and “60 Minutes” was doing a piece based on his reporting of good cops gone bad. It was a heady time for the newspaperman, then working for New York Newsday.

Standing outside the paper’s Third Avenue office, I asked him how he had managed to write the book while also juggling the day job and family life. “You just do it,” he said. “You lock yourself in a room and you do it.”

McAlary, who died at age 41 on Christmas Day from colon cancer, did it with “Buddy Boys” in 1988 and four more times since then. Five books published in 10 years--an impressive output for any writer and extremely rare among those more accustomed to feeding the next day’s paper, as McAlary did hundreds of times as a columnist for the New York Post and, most recently, as a Pulitzer Prize winner at the New York Daily News.

McAlary’s fifth book, “Sore Loser,” was published by William Morrow & Co. in mid-November and moved him further along on a fresh track--fiction. While not exactly a first novel--his novelization of the movie “Cop Land” (based on James Mangold’s screenplay) was published by Miramax/Hyperion in 1997--”Sore Loser” has earned serious first-novel attention.

TV host Charlie Rose and others in the national media had wanted to interview McAlary about “Sore Loser.” Morrow publicist Dee Dee DeBartlo said: “Had he been well, we would have sent him out on a tour.”

The novel will speak for him instead.

Paul Colford’s e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com.