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"  Janice Min is intently examining a wall plastered with mocked-up pages of the publication she launched last year, the magazine version of the venerable Hollywood Reporter. Splashed across the cover is the cast of the buzzy Spielberg-produced sci-fi show Terra Nova. Inside, one story dissects the ongoing feud between Paramount&amp;#039;s Brad Grey and DreamWorks&amp;#039; Jeffrey Katzenberg over distribution rights (and much, much more!), while another pays tribute to Broadcast News producer and Bogdanovich ex Polly Platt, who died in late July. Wearing a snug navy blue Phillip Lim dress and black patent Louboutin wedges, Min is decisive. Within minutes, she&amp;#039;s decided to give more space to the Platt memorial piece (&amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got great stuff from Cameron [Crowe] and Bogdanovich&amp;quot;), which means cramming the &amp;quot;Yes, I Did Say That!&amp;quot; quotes roundup onto a business page (a momentary qualm: &amp;quot;Is it slightly barfy to have quotes face news?&amp;quot;) and possibly &amp;quot;whacking&amp;quot; down a six-page TV-executive roundtable. She also requests a fix for an ambiguous cartoon of men in hats illustrating a story about potential investors for TV website Hulu: &amp;quot;If they were just holding cash in their hands, that would make it clearer.&amp;quot; Indeed. Min, whom her boss, Richard Beckman, admiringly compares to &amp;quot;an iceberg\u2014as bright as she is on the surface, you know there&amp;#039;s a whole depth to her that goes way beyond what she projects,&amp;quot; leans back and runs her manicured fingers through her loosely curled hair. &amp;quot;Anything else?&amp;quot; she asks. In less than 24 hours, the 57 pages arrayed before her will be released to the printer, bound, and delivered to the doorstep or desk of every agent, publicist, studio chief, producer, writer, actor, macher, and striver in greater Los Angeles and beyond. And largely because of changes Min has implemented during her short tenure at the Reporter, the ranks of Tinseltown won&amp;#039;t use the magazine as a coaster. They&amp;#039;ll actually read it. When Min, the former editor in chief of celebrity tabloid Us Weekly, was hired in May 2010 to transform the flatlining Reporter into the ultimate insider glossy\u2014&amp;quot;The Economist meets Vanity Fair,&amp;quot; as Beckman, the company&amp;#039;s new CEO, was fond of saying\u2014nobody was particularly optimistic about her chances. The Hollywood Reporter&amp;#039;s glory days were as over as Betamax, to the extent that it had ever had them. Started as a daily newspaper chronicling the fledgling film industry in 1930, the always fluffy, gossipy Reporter over time became friendlier and friendlier to the Hollywood heavies it covered\u2014convenient, since its large-living businessman owner, William R. Wilkerson, relied on them to prop it up with advertising when he gambled away its earnings. (Wilkerson also penned a daily column, which he used during the McCarthy era to inveigh against industry Communists.) In the meantime, a competing publication, Daily Variety, was launched in 1933 and quietly established itself as the paper of record with its more scrupulous reporting and higher editorial standards. The situation was pretty much status quo\u2014with the Reporter trailing Variety in reputation though still fighting hard for scoops and ad dollars\u2014until the bottom fell out of the business model for both trades in the mid-2000s. The standard trade-paper formula\u2014in which a publication&amp;#039;s readers are also its subjects and advertisers\u2014worked during the flush days of the movie industry. Variety and the Reporter wrote favorably about the studios and agencies, who in turn paid their bills through sponsorships and advertising, including the &amp;quot;For Your Consideration&amp;quot; awards season campaigns that regularly accounted for half of the papers&amp;#039; total revenue. But after the Writers Guild of America strike halted film and TV production for a hundred days in late 2007 and 2008, and the economy began to falter, studios tightened their belts. As advertising dried up, the trades faced incursions from the blogosphere, notably in the form of Nikki Finke, a sharp-tongued entertainment columnist whose increasingly popular website, Deadline Hollywood, took a no-holds-barred approach to breaking industry news and the minutiae of the strike, a topic on which the trades anxiously vacillated for fear of alienating either side (the studios or the writers). How anyone could alter this landscape\u2014why someone with a track record such as Min&amp;#039;s would even want to try\u2014was the question in Hollywood. Or, it was the question in half of the town: The other half was snootily bemoaning the takeover of the Reporter by an outsider. &amp;quot;I am saddened to see Hollywood lose yet another source for business news,&amp;quot; Finke told the Huffington Post, &amp;quot;since this hire clearly shows that won&amp;#039;t be the focus of THR any longer\u2014just as I&amp;#039;ve been predicting it wouldn&amp;#039;t.&amp;quot; Beckman\u2014whose Prometheus Global Media acquired the Reporter along with a stable of waning trades including Adweek and Billboard from Nielsen Business Media in 2009\u2014says the reaction wasn&amp;#039;t surprising. &amp;quot;People were very critical, and rightly so: The former Hollywood Reporter was a great brand but not a good product.&amp;quot; As for Min, her name barely registered among the Reporter&amp;#039;s readers. Raised in Littleton, Colorado, the youngest of three children of an IRS agent mother and a zoology professor turned businessman father, she&amp;#039;d spent much of her life in Manhattan and the better part of the last decade feeding the masses&amp;#039; obsession with celebrity atop the ultimate nose-pressed-to-glass publication, Us Weekly\u2014the antithesis of a jargon-spewing trade. During her tenure from 2003 to 2009, she won accolades for doubling the magazine&amp;#039;s circulation, ultimately driving more than a million what she called &amp;quot;nice young women&amp;quot; (and a few guys) to the newsstands each week to devour her tongue-in-cheek coverage of the mishaps, marriages, and foibles of Paris, Nicole, Lindsay, and Jon &amp;amp;amp; Kate. Beckman started courting Min in April 2010 after reading in the New York Post that she&amp;#039;d sold her SoHo loft for $6.2 million and planned to decamp to Los Angeles (it was actually Northern California, she says). An exceptionally aggressive Brit who&amp;#039;d made his name as a marketing and ad man at Cond\u00E9 Nast (his nickname, &amp;quot;Mad Dog,&amp;quot; arose from rumors that, for example, he&amp;#039;d once bumped two female staffers&amp;#039; heads together at a party in an effort to encourage them to kiss), Beckman had left the Newhouse empire in early 2010 for the chance to forge his own. Over breakfast at the Bowery Hotel in Soho, he filled Min in on his plan to recapture the attention of entertainment-business brass and other &amp;quot;influencers&amp;quot; from the media, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley: They&amp;#039;d scrap the plodding newspaper format for a three-pronged approach that would include a daily PDF e-mail with breaking industry news, a robust website to compete with Finke and friends, and a broader-interest weekly magazine packed with big photos; incisive, contextual features; and as many luxury ads as he could sell. Though she&amp;#039;d never looked at the Reporter before Beckman came calling, Min says she immediately got it: &amp;quot;It just felt so obvious to me.&amp;quot; Not only did L.A. lack anything like a New York magazine, but the outlets in place churned out bits of data\u2014comings and goings, production snafus\u2014but little in the way of deep coverage or simple entertainment. &amp;quot;I could see exactly what The Hollywood Reporter would be, what it would feel like, how it would read,&amp;quot; she continues, sitting in her sparsely appointed office five floors above busy Wilshire Boulevard. (In mid-July, the magazine moved into fancier digs down the street.) &amp;quot;It should feel luxurious, smart, special, and very respectful of what people do here.&amp;quot; Still, it took Min a month to say yes to Beckman (which surely had the Mad Dog chewing his chain). When she left Us in July 2009, the economy was in recession, and great magazine titles were being shuttered. Even Us&amp;#039;s ad pages had declined 10 percent in the first half of the year. &amp;quot;I knew there was no way [the category] was growing any more,&amp;quot; Min says. &amp;quot;It was totally maxed out.&amp;quot; As was she. Money wasn&amp;#039;t an issue for her; she&amp;#039;d reportedly pocketed some $2 million a year from Us owner Jann Wenner, thanks, by many accounts, to her politely relentless negotiating prowess. Thirty-nine, she had two young boys with her husband, Peter Sheehy, a high school history teacher who became a stay-at-home dad, and she was anxious to enjoy her family&amp;#039;s company\u2014and some space from Jessica Simpson and The Real Housewives. &amp;quot;I found growing the business interesting, but I didn&amp;#039;t find the actual content interesting,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want to be the Us Weekly lady for the rest of my life.&amp;quot; During her time off, Min skied with Sheehy, did yoga, lunched, shopped, and secured a six-figure deal with St. Martin&amp;#039;s Press for a book about celebrity culture&amp;#039;s effect on motherhood (due next spring). &amp;quot;It was heaven, pure heaven,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not one of those crazy type-A people who doesn&amp;#039;t know how to do nothing.&amp;quot; At least she can do nothing for a little while. Ten months after leaving Us, Min became The Hollywood Reporter lady. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s almost like a drug,&amp;quot; she says, trying to explain her decision to take on the overhaul of a publication like the Reporter. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really exhilarating to grow something.&amp;quot; So far, Min&amp;#039;s Reporter has featured a high-low mix of &amp;quot;7 Days of Deals,&amp;quot; box-office numbers, and inside-the-101 controversies (e.g., &amp;quot;What Really Happened,&amp;quot; a piece about the firing of The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont) spiked with baby news (&amp;quot;Hitched, Hatched, Hired&amp;quot;), a story here on Hollywood&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;New Plastic Surgery Alternative,&amp;quot; a spread there on &amp;quot;L.A.&amp;#039;s Power Golf Clubs&amp;quot; (Ari Emanuel&amp;#039;s handicap is 4.0; Justin Timberlake&amp;#039;s 5.4), plus profiles and nostalgia essays, lawyer and film school rankings, style features, and reviews. Gone are the thinly veiled press releases and clumsy tradespeak that once defined the paper. (&amp;quot;B.O. for box office? That&amp;#039;s gross!&amp;quot; Min told some of the old-regime reporters early on. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t want to read about B.O.&amp;quot;) &amp;quot;There are few things I look forward to reading more than the Reporter,&amp;quot; says DreamWorks&amp;#039; Katzenberg, days after editor-at-large Kim Masters&amp;#039; anonymously sourced account of his feud with Brad Grey ran. (Katzenberg has also been part of three of the magazine&amp;#039;s photo shoots.) &amp;quot;What Janice has managed to do is deliver an exciting, fun, and singularly unique snapshot of the entertainment landscape. And she&amp;#039;s done it overnight.&amp;quot; How does it stack up to Variety? &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re comparing apples and submarines,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Variety is a daily industry paper that is very, very business focused. The Hollywood Reporter is a weekly that has morphed into much more of a consumeresque magazine.&amp;quot; Bonnie Hammer, chairman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment and Studios, says Min&amp;#039;s outsider status may have been her secret weapon. &amp;quot;She didn&amp;#039;t have an agenda,&amp;quot; Hammer says. &amp;quot;She wasn&amp;#039;t somebody who grew out of the trade part of our business, so she could take a fresh look at what a magazine should be if it&amp;#039;s going to straddle a very risky position\u2014something between trade and consumer.&amp;quot; Min seems to be a natural at knowing what sells magazines, or, as former Wenner Media general manager Kent Brownridge says, &amp;quot;putting stuff in [rack] pockets people want.&amp;quot; The definition of precocious, she skipped third grade, opted as a Connie Chung\u2013admiring preteen to work on the school newspaper rather than enter the gifted program, graduated high school at 16, and later launched magazines for Time Inc. (InStyle&amp;#039;s weddings and makeover spin-offs) while still in her twenties. (Min offers that her Korean immigrant parents were &amp;quot;oddly permissive, definitely for Asian parents&amp;quot; about her decision to choose journalism over the gifted track, so much so that when fellow Asians have sought her advice on how to convince their families that the profession is a worthy one, Min says she comes up blank.) When she was hired in 2002 by Us Weekly&amp;#039;s newly installed editor in chief Bonnie Fuller to help turn the rudderless tabloid into a People-type powerhouse, all signs pointed to what would become America&amp;#039;s full-blown obsession with celebrities and the pseudovariety. That year, Britney Spears topped Forbes&amp;#039; &amp;quot;Most Powerful Celebrities&amp;quot; list, and Kelly Clarkson won the first season of American Idol; Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie&amp;#039;s The Simple Life debuted in 2003. Within months and with plenty of blown-up photos of Spears and Co., plus a new pink-and-purple color scheme and a feisty, bitchy-best-friend tone woven through sections such as &amp;quot;Stars\u2014They&amp;#039;re Just Like Us!,&amp;quot; Fuller had boosted circulation and profits, regularly selling 500,000 copies of her confection at the newsstand. So satisfied was Wenner with the team that when Fuller abruptly decamped for a bigger paycheck at American Media, Inc. (publisher of Star and The National Enquirer) 14 months into her tenure, he didn&amp;#039;t hesitate in selecting a successor. &amp;quot;There was no question,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was Janice.&amp;quot; Min&amp;#039;s first issue, celebrating the May-December romance of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (&amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s Love!&amp;quot; the cover line read), sold 541,000 copies. Her second, 601,000. Soon after, she passed 700,000 and persuaded the notoriously frugal Wenner to use a higher-quality paper stock. Min took a slightly different approach from her predecessor, he says. &amp;quot;She took the meanness out, smoothed out the edges.&amp;quot; A graduate of Columbia&amp;#039;s journalism school, Min also preferred verifiable news to hearsay. &amp;quot;She was the one who put priority on getting the celebrity sit-downs, the cooperative stories,&amp;quot; says a senior Us staffer. &amp;quot;Bonnie was more, Let&amp;#039;s just get the juice. Janice wanted the actual, real story.&amp;quot; One of her biggest scores at Us, for instance, was wrangling both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to poke fun at themselves for stories. Min&amp;#039;s commitment to the job was all-consuming, as evidenced by the tale of her spending the entire weekend before giving birth to her first child\u2014two months after taking over Us, she&amp;#039;d discovered she was pregnant\u2014negotiating coverage of the surprise wedding of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. The cover story on the nuptials closed in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and by 7:50 a.m., Min was dishing with Today&amp;#039;s Matt Lauer about J.Lo&amp;#039;s intimate, 40-person reception in the backyard of her Beverly Hills home\u2014&amp;quot;absolutely the anti-Bennifer wedding,&amp;quot; she noted. (Though, of course, J.Lo and Anthony announced their very Bennifer breakup this summer.) Afterward, Min left Rocke\u00ADfeller Center to see her doctor, who told her that her water was breaking. She went to the hospital that afternoon and gave birth to her son, Will, two days later. The issue sold 1,009,217 copies on newsstands. It was Min&amp;#039;s first million-plus seller. Min&amp;#039;s love of glossies doesn&amp;#039;t seem to be the product of a desire to hang with the glamorous set; a self-described &amp;quot;nerd,&amp;quot; she rarely attends events. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t get the feeling she wants to join the `club&amp;#039;; I just think she likes watching the circus,&amp;quot; says Reporter senior writer Bill Higgins. There&amp;#039;s no doubt that for someone who seems never to have uttered an unconsidered word (she probably learned the dangers of blabbermouthing at Us), she is disarmingly down-to-earth. She&amp;#039;s also not a screamer, colleagues say, though she can be demanding. &amp;quot;You can be between a rock and Janice Min, and the rock is going to crack,&amp;quot; says Higgins, likening the pressure she can put on a reporter to get a story to Guant\u00E1namo waterboarding. Her best trait may be her collaborative nature, by her own estimation and others&amp;#039;. &amp;quot;Janice was clear about what she knew and what she didn&amp;#039;t know,&amp;quot; says Owen Phillips, the executive editor she brought over from The Wall Street Journal&amp;#039;s weekend magazine. &amp;quot;And she learned what she didn&amp;#039;t know amazingly quickly.&amp;quot; During a daily staff meeting, she listens as much as she speaks. While she intervenes at times\u2014some ideas are &amp;quot;fun!&amp;quot;; others, including her own, might be &amp;quot;gross&amp;quot;\u2014her comments carry an implied question mark or set of ellipses, as if to say, &amp;quot;Tell me if I&amp;#039;m wrong....&amp;quot; Her competitors says she&amp;#039;s dead wrong about one thing: a sunny future for the Reporter. While company officials say January\u2013July ad revenue from the large-format magazine, which debuted in November 2010, is up 40 percent over the daily newspaper&amp;#039;s take during the same period last year and traffic on the relaunched website has risen 132 percent (it received 4.4 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore\u2014more than Variety online, Finke&amp;#039;s Deadline, and Sharon Waxman&amp;#039;s The Wrap combined), skepticism remains about its business model. &amp;quot;Janice has put together a handsome magazine, but I don&amp;#039;t think anyone knows who the reader is supposed to be,&amp;quot; Waxman says in an e-mail. &amp;quot;And while Hollywood likes it well enough, you&amp;#039;d be hard-pressed to find a paying subscriber.&amp;quot; (Reporter publisher Lynne Segall says half of the magazine&amp;#039;s circulation is paid and half is &amp;quot;controlled,&amp;quot; trade-lingo for providing free copies to valued readers.) As for Finke, she and the Reporter mixed it up in September when the publication&amp;#039;s lawyers sent her a letter demanding, among other things, that she stop telling advertisers the magazine was on the verge of folding; she countered on Deadline that the Reporter was in financial trouble and closed her post with her own version of legal jargon: &amp;quot;Now get the f--k out of my face.&amp;quot; More disinterested observers point to the failures of such well-liked titles as Premiere (which folded in 2007) and Variety supplement V Life (2003\u20132006) as indicators of the weak demographics and ad market for upscale, insidery entertainment magazines. And a pair of business-side shake-ups in July hinted at some turmoil within the company: Reporter publisher Lori Burgess, formerly of OK!, left and was replaced by trade-sales vet Segall, and shortly thereafter Beckman issued a quizzical announcement relinquishing day-to-day responsibilities for the Reporter to &amp;quot;create a new division of Prometheus that will focus entirely on...building a world-class branded entertainment unit.&amp;quot;  If any of this rattles Min, she isn&amp;#039;t letting on. There&amp;#039;s a significant audience for the content she and her staff are creating, she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s sort of just fabulous enough and interesting enough to bring in people from the outside world.&amp;quot; If that means offering constantly updated coverage of the Kardashians, Jersey Shore (she assigned a review of the show&amp;#039;s season-four debut), or even her old friends The Real Housewives, so be it. Stars and the people who make them are more like &amp;quot;us&amp;quot; than they&amp;#039;d ever care to admit. The zeitgeist is the zeitgeist, and Janice Min embraces it. As for her ambitions for the Reporter, Min says, &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t say there&amp;#039;s a larger goal, except to have more people read it and like it and build our Web audience.&amp;quot; Hers is a remarkably angst-free approach, especially compared with that of Finke, who covers the industry as a morality play of the quotidian, in which the sinners are venal and the saints are golden\u2014until the two switch places according to her whim. The Reporter, meanwhile, is more Chaucer, less Dante, busy chronicling (and in part creating) characters who, while they may make dumb, even craven, moves, are never villains. It&amp;#039;s all for one and one for all in the magical world of Min&amp;#039;s Hollywood. And playing nice, or at least nicer\u2014certainly the Reporter&amp;#039;s glossy cover, now coveted promotional real estate, is an appeal to the town&amp;#039;s vanity\u2014is not without tangible benefits. Last November, the producer of ABC&amp;#039;s hit Two and a Half Men, Chuck Lorre, shone on the front of the Reporter, and a few months later the website broke the story that Ashton Kutcher would take over Charlie Sheen&amp;#039;s role on the show. In July, a January cover boy, Glee cocreator Ryan Murphy, called the Reporter with this nugget: He was replacing the show&amp;#039;s three biggest stars\u2014Lea Michele, Cory Monteith, and Chris Colfer\u2014after the fourth season. Coincidence, or good old-fashioned reporting, combined with the clout that comes with fulfilling peoples&amp;#039; narcissistic needs? Does it matter? At a meeting in early August, after the staff has volunteered ideas for a summer box office roundup, a fall TV preview, and even an update on the magazine&amp;#039;s amateur softball team (&amp;quot;Who here scored?&amp;quot; Min wonders), the editor pauses. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s talk about Anderson,&amp;quot; she says. As in Cooper, the hunky CNN anchor to whose new daytime talk show Min wants to send a reporter. &amp;quot;Will they let us in?&amp;quot; She looks over to editor-at-large Masters, two seats down, whose widened eyes and crinkled nose express a blend of pain and incredulity. &amp;quot;Why the face?&amp;quot; Min asks. &amp;quot;I just think the show is going to...&amp;quot; Masters pantomimes an explosion. &amp;quot;Kaboom.&amp;quot; Min doesn&amp;#039;t flinch. &amp;quot;All the more reason.&amp;quot; Pick Up This Issue on Newsstands on October 18! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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