BONNIE Fuller, who two weeks ago was ousted from her $2.5 million a year editorial director job at Star magazine publisher American Media Inc., is learning that finding backers to finance her latest attempt at reinvention isn’t so easy.
According to sources, Fuller was trying to hook up with 3i, a global private-equity and venture-capital firm with more than $5.6 billion in assets, which counts media as one of the eight industries on which it focuses. However, that venture might have fizzled even before it got off the ground.
Calls to 3i’s Park Avenue offices revealed that Fuller – who has a reputation for landing and then quickly departing throughout most of her publishing career – was no longer a presence in the office.
It’s all the more surprising given Fuller was said to have lured her former assistant at America Media over to 3i.
“She is not using our offices anymore,” the company receptionist said when Media Ink called inquiring about Fuller.
Dawn Lesh, a 3i spokeswoman, confirmed that Fuller had showed up at the office for several days, but even Lesh was scratching her head trying to figure out what Fuller was doing there.
“She may be talking to someone else, but it’s not us,” Lesh said. “She wasn’t working for us, or with us.”
Lesh added that 3i generally works on deals at the several hundred million dollar level and doesn’t do start-ups.
All of which might make the upcoming feature on Fuller in next month’s Condé Nast Portfolio a bit more interesting, given that the daily press has already covered her departure and there’s currently nothing new to report on her.
Portfolio Editor-in-Chief Joanne Lipman is said to have assigned Senior Editor Kevin Gray to do the piece, which will be in a Q&A format in a section of the magazine called Exit Strategies.
The effort is said to be part of Lipman’s move to enliven the magazine’s pages with more personalities.
A Portfolio spokeswoman said the magazine’s policy is not to comment on stories that staffers may or may not have under consideration.
But an insider source said the Fuller piece was rushed into print and is definitely included in the July issue slated to hit in two weeks.
What makes the Fuller piece all the more interesting is that Fuller left Condé Nast rather unceremoniously in 2001, when she was the editor-in-chief of Glamour.
Fuller and AMI CEO David Pecker, despite a frosty relationship over the past few years, have been making nice with one another in recent public comments, with Fuller insisting her leaving AMI was her own idea.
She had already been stripped of day-to-day editing responsibility at Star magazine nearly a year earlier.
AMI has not filed a breakdown on her severance deal, but one source said it would probably amount to 50 or 60 cents on the dollar.
The contract, which included a base salary of $1.5 million a year plus a bonus of up to $1 million, was set to expire on March 31, 2009.
GIT OUT
Greg Gittrich, the metro editor at the Daily News, is the latest to exit Mort Zuckerman’s beleaguered tabloid. He’s heading to NBC, as had been rumored.
Insiders at NBC tell Media Ink that he is going to be the news editor of the digital operations of NBC Local Media Group, a new job.
(Gawker.com had correctly heard that the man they once dubbed the “deputy metropolitan love monkey” was rumored to be going to NBC, but had no details.)
An official announcement from NBC is expected sometime next week, when the network unveils a digital strategy that will, for the first time, try to consolidate local news digital platforms, mobile applications and other Web-based news ventures.
At the morale-challenged Daily News, it now means that most of the main characters who were featured in cable channel Bravo’s “Tabloid Wars” show that aired a while back are now gone.
Gittrich powered away on his own, as did reporter Tony Sclafani, who took a p.r. job with the Fire Department, and Michael “Cookie Monster” Cooke, the paper’s editor-in-chief when the show was filmed but who had left by the time it aired.
Others from the show who are no longer at the paper include gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, his one-time assistant Hud Morgan, and editors Dean Chang and Mark Mooney.
At 33, Gittrich was seen as being on the fast track.
But as one former news hand said, “If you’re young and talented and you see someone throwing a life buoy into the water, you better swim to it as fast as you can.”
Gittrich declined to comment.
But insiders say his last day is Saturday, and he should be good and hung over for that final shift, since he is being feted with a farewell party at Hudson Yards Friday night.
CARR JACKED
Book publishers are gathering in Los Angeles this weekend for the annual Book Expo America, which is designed to drum up excitement among booksellers for upcoming fall, winter and spring titles.
Simon & Schuster Publisher David Rosenthal is said to be very keen on a memoir by New York Times reporter David Carr called “The Night of the Gun.”
The book, about Carr’s former life as a drug addict, is the antidote to James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces.”
Carr used his reporting skills to track down old arrest records from his druggie past 20 years ago, and even from his more recent past at the New York Times, when a trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina tipped him back on the path to alcohol abuse.
After a DWI ar rest, he ended up in rehab.
The story is told with unflinching and brutal honesty. Carr videotapes old girlfriends, drug counse lors, street users, buddies, journalists and editors to squeeze out details of his past that he had forgotten or buried.
The book is due out in early August and Simon & Schuster is giving it a 90,000-copy first printing. It’s being billed as one of the big books in the fall 2008 lineup.
MIA STORY
Wil S. Hylton, the GQ writer who specialized in high adventure and investigative stories, has snagged what is estimated to be a $350,000 advance to write a book based on a story in the current issue, “Leave No Man Behind.”
The Riverhead imprint of Penguin took it off the table in a pre-emptive deal just before the Memorial Day break.
Very appropriate. The story in the June issue of the mag tells the story of the hunt to bring home the bodies of servicemen and women who have going missing in action.
It centers on the search for one particular plane that contained airman Jimmie Doyle, which went down off the coast of Palau, a small is land in the south Pacific not far from Guam, on Sept. 1, 1944.
Doyle’s son, Tommy was only 15 months old when his father disappeared, and the story is told through one son’s six-year trek to discover what really happened, and the work by the Joint POW-MIA Account Command (JPAC) to help find him.
The working title is “Searching for 453” – based on the final three digits in the tail number of the plane.
It’s Hylton’s first book.
“I’m a little nervous,” he said. “It’s a lot longer than a magazine article.” keith.kelly@nypost.com