Curry, whose cover look trades in her usual smooth "Today" Show bob for curls and an insouciant smile, seems worth it in her terrific interview, talking about bringing attention to the crisis in Darfur, the tragic loss of her brother, and the lessons of her Japanese mother and American father (from her father, to "be of service"; from her mother, "gambaru," Japanese for "Don't even think about giving up"). She also discusses growing up as a children of mixed heritage ("I come from a long line of very open-minded lovers") and marvels that "a girl growing up in a family where the mother barely spoke English correctly -- could rise and become someone who speaks in English to millions of people every day." It's stong stuff, moving yet grounded and upbeat — as on camera, she comes cross as extremely likeable. Curry has taken some flack for being something of a ninny, but I'm a convert. Guess I have something in common with 195,000 More readers.
— Rachel Sklar
Men's Health Gets (Re-)Laid: Men's Health debuted a new layout in its September issue, with changes including a new color palette, redesigned typeface and a new series of transparency effects. Core topics in each issue are now color coded, including red for fitness and orange for nutrition. The new typeface, designed specifically for the magazine, is "meant to suggest a 'No B.S.' sort of attitude," and "convey a sense of being grounded," said design consultant Joe Heroun. The differences are subtle, which the editors say was intentional; new transparency effects include three different color grades overlapping to produce more tones, and a series of new accent colors including red, orange and yellow have been added to highlight text and graphic details.
Said editor-in-chief David Zinczenko, "A good part of our audience turns over every four or five years, and that means they're bringing fresh experiences and new problems to the magazine. For us to respond to [these readers], we need to reimagine the magazine" (MH also reimagined Zinczenko, who sports a new editor's photo).
Perhaps to catch up with its recent jump to the top of the newsstand, the magazine's website, Menshealth.com, is undergoing a massive overhaul led by former editorial director of Men's Health International Bill Stump. Stump, the newly-minted head of new product development, will be responsible for overseeing the integration of te formerly-distinct online and magazine teams. Said Zinczenko, "In the next six months we'll unveil a better platform, more tools, and commit to daily publishing with frequent news updates." The upgraded site, which averages close to 500,000 page views a day, will include new features such as staff and star blogging including cover models, regular podcasts, video and slideshows.
— Melissa Lafsky
Sean McManus, Finally You Catch A Break! Jossip confirms it: RadarOnline will officially re-launch on Septemer 5th, rejoining the land of the 24-hour news cycle with some fresh Fresh Intelligence. The website froze in time on December 15th, 2005, when the Radar 2.0 folded — leaving all the most recent items in limbo on the site's archived pages. Unfortunately for CBS News honcho Sean McManus, Radar had just posted a juicy and salacious item about him and his "hooker stalker," a long, detailed piece about a spurned and angry "part-time prostitute and former bra model" with whom McManus may or may have not had a steamy assignation. The piece is actually quite sympathetic to McManus, but that's beside the point: for the past eight months, anyone who has ever gone to a Radar page has seen McManus' smiling and hooker-stalked mug atop the Fresh Intelligence column, usually running down the center of the page. Even after the Radar front page was taken down (it now features the illustration from which our pic was pilfered), the archives were readily available to turn up with any applicable Google search (don't take our word for it, see for yourself here and here and here and here and here and here and here).
In the meantime, Radar has been keeping busy in anticipation of the launch; according to Radar Deputy Editor Chris Tennant "the main difference this go round is that we're devoting significantly more time, creative energy and resources to the web site." This will include the now-pretty-much-obligatory video and blog content from a number of contributors, at this point TBA. Which is good news for McManus: Hopefully this will translate into plenty of material to knock him off the page and safely into oblivion.
— Rachel Sklar
