Bonnie Fuller exiting Star post
Tabloid vet working on media venture
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As of Wednesday, she will become an editor at large at Star and a consultant to American Media's chairman and chief exec David J. Pecker. A three-year contract she signed in 2006 was set to expire next spring. There were reports that she was negotiating an extension with Pecker, but Fuller emphasized it was her decision to depart.
Fuller said she was working on a media-related venture but wouldn't offer specifics.
Fuller has often been depicted, especially by ex-employees, as a demanding boss, but her two decades in the magazine biz have shaped modern celebrity culture. She is nicknamed the "tabloid queen," though recently her reign was not as absolute as it had been.
The editor pulled down an average of $2 million a year to help transform Star from frowzy supermarket tabloid to a glossy magazine that dished plenty of celeb gossip. Even though her feel for consumer appetites for celebrity coverage was ahead of the curve, her Star signing in 2003 set tongues wagging. It also amped the competition with other titles, especially Us Weekly, which Fuller left to join Star.
With the celeb category saturated by new launches and invaded by websites such as TMZ, growth became more difficult for Star, which lagged behind Us.
"I'm very proud of how successful it was," Fuller told Daily Variety of her five-year run. "There was a tremendous amount of naysaying when I first started. But the magazine is tremendously profitable and has set all kinds of records and broken a lot of stories."
Before her run at Us, Fuller edited Glamour and Cosmopolitan, succeeding Helen Gurley Brown at the latter. In 2006, she wrote a book called "The Joys of Much Too Much" aimed at working women.
