Magazines

Despite carnage on Wall Street, vacant storefronts on Madison Avenue and pricey restaurants offering "grill menus" (read: cheap burgers), some things remain unchanged in the great metropolis. The price of the average Manhattan apartment is still hovering at more than $1 million.

The state's ethics enforcement agency has found no wrongdoing in its review of a complaint made four years ago against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in connection with a consulting contract he reached with a muscle magazine publisher days before he took office in 2003. The Fair Political Practices Commission, in a letter earlier this month, told a lawyer for the Republican governor that the complaint filed by the California Democratic Party is now closed. The contract with American Media Inc. was estimated to be worth up to $8 million over five years.

The Los Angeles Times editorial staff will stop producing its money-losing monthly magazine after the July issue, Editor Russ Stanton said Tuesday. The paper's business side was finalizing plans for a new incarnation of the magazine under the direction of the Los Angeles Times Media Group, according to Stanton and Publisher David Hiller. The Media Group publishes several other titles outside of the newsroom, including Hoy, MetroMix and the Times Community Newspapers.

There ARE many photos out there purporting to show Mischa Barton's lumpy, bumpy, cellulite-riddled bottom, and I love poring over them. The photos of an "exhausted" Heather Locklear before she was carted off? Love them too. I could stare for hours at the fine lines around Angelina Jolie's eyes. (C'mon. Didn't you see the cover of last week's People magazine?

It took 18 years of marriage for David C. Wright to decide there was nothing wrong with being single. Now this 65-year-old divorce is trying to help other unmarried people embrace their lifestyle and shed the stereotype that they're lonely bachelors or cat-loving old maids.

Time Warner Inc. has sold the Progressive Farmer magazine to publisher DTN for an undisclosed amount as part of a plan to shed smaller Time Inc. publications. The Progressive Farmer, formed in 1886, is targeted toward rural readers and has more than 600,000 subscribers, the Omaha-based DTN said in a statement. Time Warner, the world's biggest media company, decided to sell after receiving an offer from DTN, Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges said in an interview.

Simone Mitchell enrolled in the Art Institute of California at San Francisco hoping to catch attention with his visual art, but it was his writing, contained in an essay about racial stereotypes in video games, that catapulted a small in-class short story to the front lines of debate on the timeless "what is art?" question. Mitchell wrote the 10-page spread for Mute/Off, a small magazine produced as part of a cultural studies class. The school pulled the magazine from circulation Dec.

A Los Angeles judge threw out a defamation lawsuit by a man who contended Fox Television and a hip-hop magazine falsely accused him of involvement in the unsolved slaying of rapper Notorious B.I.G. Tyruss Himes said he lost a record deal because of the stories by Fox-owned KTTV-TV Channel 11 in Los Angeles and XXL magazine. Notorious B.I.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace, was shot to death in Los Angeles in 1997.

Primedia Inc. plans to sell its magazine unit, with 70 titles that include Motor Trend and Surfer, in a transaction that would leave the company a distributor of free auto and home guides. The Enthusiast Media group had more than $500 million in sales last year, representing about half of Primedia's annual revenue. Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Lehman Bros. will manage the sale, New York-based Primedia said. Primedia, which is about 60% owned by private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

A prominent fertility scientist whose firm owns Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles is embroiled in a plagiarism dispute that straddles two continents, has triggered legal battles in South Korea and has raised questions about the practices of a leading U.S. fertility journal. Dr. Kwang-Yul Cha, whose company also owns fertility clinics and a large hospital in Seoul, is listed as the primary author on a medical paper that appeared in December 2005 in the U.S.