By Jeff Bercovici

    Brace yourself for a brand new Talk. 
    Americans apparently weren’t quite ready for the magazine’s harsh, European aspect, so Tina Brown has rallied her staff about her and re-envisioned Talk’s look.
    Now the question is, will regular Americans like Talk any better with a more familiar face? Or has Talk, in trying to please all of the people, simply made itself a disposable alternative to People magazine?
    The answers are probably, and most likely not, although it might seem so on first glance.
    For starters, regular folks will probably like the cover better, although they might not notice it as well. Talk’s original cover, based on the look of Paris Match and the German magazine Stern, was dark, stark, bold, and eye-catching. It was the first indication to readers that Talk was something altogether new and a bit alien.
    Covers carried multiple pictures of celebrities and politicos, sometimes in novel arrangements; the first issue’s cover placed three identical photos of Hillary Clinton side by side along with a snapshot of George W. and a naughty picture of Gwyneth.
    That’s all in the past now. February’s cover is a single black-and-white photo of a fuzzy-chinned Leonardo DiCaprio. The palette is limited to black, white, and red, so it’s still visually striking, but for better or worse, it looks a lot more like any other magazine.
    The cover lines are less distinctive now too. Unfurling across the page, they lack the newspaper-esque telegraphic immediacy they had when they were confined to three or four words on the left-hand margin.
    Inside, find a explanation by Tina Brown in her column, "Tina Brown’s Notebook," of these and other changes. Trying not to seem miffed, she hints at the provinciality of the American public (at least, of the non-New York-dwelling American public), saying, "The free-form pagination and multiple-image covers I admired in European magazines seem to have bothered enough readers here to merit some adjustment."
    Helping her adjust, she says, are new creative director Oliviero Toscani and new editorial director Robert Wallace.
    Out, she doesn’t say, is art director Lesley Vinson, who was in charge of crafting Talk’s European feel. So much for that, huh? The magazine’s new look is, if not actually conventional, at least decidedly more American.
    The table of contents, which used to read straight through from front to back, is now broken into features and departments. Gone is the newspaper-inspired look of catch-all department "The Conversation," while the erstwhile "First Talk" photo-montage section has morphed into "First Look," which resembles in its layout a spread from People magazine. You certainly can’t get much more American than that.
    Under the umbrella of content, we presumably have Robert Wallace to thank, at least in part, for such editorial as the cover story on Leonardo DiCaprio. Wallace, you’ll recall, came to Talk after resigning from St. Martin’s Press over the publication of "Fortunate Son," the George W. Bush biography written by an ex-convict.
    The story on Leo is milk pap, and in a quick scan of the articles, it might seem as though Tina has chosen to ease up on the spice to make Talk more palatable for the masses.
     But there’s still some good edgy fare in these pages. The article on Gerald Marie, who was deposed as president of Elite modeling agency for sleeping with underage models, is a seamy little nugget, and Howard Kurtz offers a clear-eyed take on the diminishing status of the White House reporter.
    Among other features is a rather alarmist piece entitled "The Sex Lives of Your Children," about the alleged sexual precociousness of the current generation of pre-adolescents. This story dovetails with an emerging theme of many Talk articles, which Media Life’s Don Wallace has characterized as "Dark Families."
    Wallace described Talk as "a darker, more complex, ungendered version of a Seven Sisters magazine." The February issue, if anything, is a move further down that path.
    Consider two of the new departments: "Marriage Lab," in which, says Brown, "we glimpse the DNA of a successful marriage," and "Mama Talks," which offers first-person accounts from celebrities’ mothers, in this case Jacqueline Stone, whose son is Oliver Stone.
    In fact, this issue is fairly bursting with family-spun pieces, from the profile of Karenna Gore to the spread on Donald Trump’s girlfriend to the piece on Martin Scorsese’s wife. Though everything is handled in a thoroughly Brownian fashion, all this emphasis on the family is clearly intended to appeal to middle America.
    Talk’s failure to do so effectively in earlier issues drew Wallace’s criticism. In his list of "Don’s 10 Handy Fixes for Tina’s Talk," no. 4 was "Glance at a map of the U.S. once in a while. There are some nice places to visit there. Send your writers and photographers. Who knows what they’ll find?" Despite Wallace’s helpful advice, the February Talk still gives the impression that America consists of New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and barren, featureless wasteland.
    Among Wallace’s other pointers was no. 3: "Don’t just talk—do something. (ie., Include a few stories where people move their bodies and have to be rescued and stuff.) Dr. Tony Dajer’s "E.R. Diary" entry addresses this complaint pretty well, but Talk could still stand to offer more in the way of excitement.
    Which brings us to Wallace’s most important advice: "No. 10: Put Meg Ryan in a black leather dominatrix outfit on your cover, pronto." Not only does the February Talk fail to put Meg Ryan in any sort of dominatrix getup, it’s also entirely devoid of any provocative photography whatsoever. No Rupert Everett as the Gay 007, no sunbathing Liz Hurley with green midgets, nothing. In fact, the raciest pictures in the whole issue are the ads for Bijan.
    Speaking of which, this issue is a lot lighter on advertising than previous ones, especially fashion. It does come packaged with a fat outsert from Benetton, though, and if you count that its ad page total matches previous issues, says a spokesman for Talk. Further, he says, February is always a light month for advertising.
    Regardless, we’ll soon see whether advertisers embrace the redesigned Talk anew…or lose it in the crowd.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.