A major blunder in Media Land: A British newspaper reported yesterday that Conde Nast was shopping Art Cooper's job last year.
   According to a report in The Guardian, James Brown, a prominent British men’s magazine editor, was invited to take over for Cooper as GQ's editor in chief but turned it down.
    A truly delicious rumor. Trouble is, it's not true.
    Brown, ex-editor of British GQ and Loaded, says the fictional GQ job offer was the result of erroneous speculation.
    He says he had told The Guardian that he was in discussions about a job in the States, but he declined to say where.    
    "They just assumed wrongly that it was GQ," says Brown.
    A spokeswoman for Conde Nast confirms his statement, and says that the job he had been discussing was the editorship of Details, not GQ, where Cooper has called the shots for the past 17 years. 
    After talks with Brown went nowhere, she says, the company hired Mark Golin away from Maxim to fill the post. 
    Brown stayed with British GQ until the magazine ran an article naming Nazi Field Marshall Erwin Rommel one of the 200 "style icons" of the 20^th century. 
    Conde Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse was reportedly not amused. Brown soon found himself fired.
     But until Brown phoned in to straighten things out, the report in The Guardian seemed highly credible given the recent history of Conde Nast.
    Newhouse has on various occasions expressed his admiration for the breakout success of Maxim, the first American men’s magazine to model itself on the British "laddy boy" books such as Loaded and FHM.
    In hiring Golin away from Maxim, Newhouse hoped to infuse Details with the same magic.
      Launched only four years ago, Maxim’s circulation has climbed to 1.6 million, with the rate base increasing to 2 million later this year under new editor Keith Blanchard.
    Meanwhile, GQ’s rate base is 700,000. The magazine managed only lackluster circulation figures in 1999, with newsstand sales off 13 percent in the first six months of the year. Single-copy sales improved modestly in the second half of the year, but were still down 6.7 percent from 1998’s marks.
    The perennial category leader in advertising revenue, GQ went through a soft patch in 1999 in ad sales as well, closing the year down 7.3 percent in ad pages from the previous year’s total.
    Earlier this year, GQ began incorporating more elements common to lads’ magazines including bikini-clad cover models and cheeky, sexually suggestive cover lines and headlines.
     In an interview with Media Life, Cooper denied that the changes represented any sort of attempt to emulate Maxim and other lads’ magazines.
    "We are not going to reposition ourselves to chase the competition," he said.
    However, a few days after that article ran, it was reported in The New York Times that the changes to GQ were indeed meant to reflect a more laddish sensibility.
     Newhouse had personally dictated such changes as an increase in the number of Maxim-style sex-kitten covers, according to sources cited in the Times article.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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