DETAILS Editor-in-Chief Mark Golin is gearing up for a major redesign of the Conde Nast monthly effective with the October issue and has top magazine designer Rhonda Rubinstein jetting into town this weekend to brainstorm.
“They’re in the process of rethinking the magazine,” says Rubinstein, reached at her current outpost as creative director of the lefty-leaning Mother Jones in San Francisco.
She plans to keep that gig on the Left Coast while helping out Golin with a major redesign on the other side of the continent. Rubinstein in the early ’90s worked on the defunct men’s magazine Smart and then Esquire before designing prototypes for Disney’s Books First and spinoffs of Wired. The latter two were never launched – but the hiring of a person with her background suggests Golin plans a sweeping overhaul.
Meanwhile, Details seems to be in need of a steadying hand on its art tiller. Three art directors have come and gone in recent weeks, following the departure last month of Robert Newman, the art director for the previous two years.
Newman tells Media Ink he is starting on June 1 as the art director of Vibe Ventures, a part of the Miller Publishing Group.
Newman’s deputy, John Giordani, was named acting art director at Details before he, too, quit last Friday.
Now Jamie Lipps is coming aboard as the acting art director at Details and will be tested over the next several months, as the work on a redesign is ongoing.
Many observers are bracing for an onslaught of beers and babes at Details – the formula that Golin used so successfully to drive Maxim’s circulation to the one-million level.
But Golin continues to insist that’s not the master plan: “There is not going to be a beer-and-babes formula. Will there be women in the issue? Yes – but that’s not all we’re about.”
*Nicky Cruz, author of “Run Baby Run,” an autobiographical bestseller that has sold more than 12 million copies in 40 languages since it appeared in 1968, is shopping a new book, “Where Were You When I Was Hurting?”
Basically, the new book will pick up on the theme of spiritual redemption displayed in the first book. Cruz was denounced by his own mother as a “son of Satan” as an 8-year old in Puerto Rico, and when he landed in Brooklyn in his teens, he became a gang leader.
After a meeting with an evangelical preacher at the age of 19, shortly after his best friend was killed in a gang fight, the atheist Cruz became an evangelical Christian preacher. That was 41 years ago, and Cruz has been bringing a message of love and redemption to inner-city kids ever since through his Nicky Cruz Outreach ministry.
“I think there is a tremendous sense of loneliness and rejection in these kids,” says Cruz, who recently visited Littleton, Colo. “At one time, it was confined to the ghettos; now it’s universal. There is a loss of spirituality that we have to bring back. Prosperity is not going to buy happiness.”
Dallas-based agent Jan Miller had Cruz in New York meeting with nine publishers last week.
“The response was very good,” says Miller, who hopes to wrap up a six-figure sale at an auction in the next two weeks.
*Insiders say Newsday had to quell a minor uproar among some reporters and editors for running a cut-out collectible card featuring Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler on Wednesday’s Student Briefing page.
Many staffers felt that it was irresponsible for the Long Island daily to portray Hitler in such a fashion. The picture was No. 20 in the Millennium Card series and was surrounded by a dotted line that suggested students should cut ’em out and trade ’em with their friends.
Howard Schneider, a managing editor who has ultimate responsibility for the page, said he took nominations from students for the cards.
“If people were upset, I could understand, but we had only three or four calls from readers and a handful of complaints internally. I think readers understood, and I don’t think anyone thought we were endorsing it as a good thing.”