Bonnie Fuller 2.0: On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're A Famous Magazine Editor!

After walking away from Us Weekly at her peak, surprising colleagues and inviting still more biting press attention, it was on to American Media Inc., where she'd been hired as editorial director overseeing a number of titles, including Star. Ms. Fuller's fall was sudden and would have seemed almost random had it not made for such delicious wish-fulfillment among those who'd long rooted for her demise.

When she left American Media in May 2008, with plans to start a new company, Bonnie Fuller Media, few were heartbroken by the reversal of fortune. Ms. Fuller planned, vaguely, to take on cyberspace with a web startup that promised, as this paper put it, to "approach Ms. Fuller as a brand" and "feature her blogging about topics such as gossip, fashion, and romance."

It wasn't to be.

"My timing was terrible," Ms. Fuller said. "I was getting my business plan ready, and I was ready to start appointments the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed."

Despite that setback, Ms. Fuller eventually found a willing collaborator in Mr. Penske, the flamboyant truck-rental scion, web entrepreneur and serial actress-dater. Mr. Penske had made a tidy sum selling his startup, Mail.com, and was busily assembling a media empire of his own, acquring Nikki Finke's Deadline blog from Village Voice Media in June 2009. He relaunched Hollywood Life, a defunct glossy, as a website several months later, with some design motifs borrowed from Us Weekly: a neon-colored palette, big pictures, eye-catching captions.