It’s a plot line straight out of the movies: A beautiful and talented young editor, darling of the world’s foremost publishing company, resigns her job in order to pursue a new life in Europe with the man she loves.
    That editor is Teen People’s Christina Ferrari, who yesterday notified her co-workers that she will be leaving come February. Ferrari is moving to Geneva, Switzerland, there to join former Time Inc. editorial director Henry Muller, according to a report by Keith Kelly in today’s New York Post.
    "[Christina] departs with our immense gratitude, enormous respect and warmest best wishes," wrote Time Inc. editorial boss Norman Pearlstine in a company-wide memo yesterday. "We sincerely hope that when she decides to become engaged in magazine-making again, it will be with Time Inc."
    And he means it. Under Ferrari, Teen People has become the biggest success story this side of Oprah. It launched in 1998 with a rate base of 500,000 into a category that wasn’t exactly wide open, what with Seventeen, YM and Teen and their collective circulation of more than six million.
    Not yet three years old, Teen People has nearly caught up with the giants, with a total paid circulation of 1,671,338 in the first six months of 2000, up 8.4 percent from 1999, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Growth has slowed but not yet stalled, and Teen People was the only one of the four leading teen ‘zines not to take a hit on the newsstand in the first half of the year, gaining 3.1 percent in single copy sales.
    On the advertising side, things are even better. Teen People has already passed Emap USA’s Teen and Gruner & Jahr’s YM to become the No. 2 teen book in ad sales after Primedia’s Seventeen. Ad pages in Teen People were up 12.8 percent through November of this year, according to PIB, and ad revenue jumped by 42.3 percent to $59.8 million.
    Ferrari, who is in her early 30s, and Muller, in his 50s, broke news of their relationship in autumn of 1999. Both were still married at the time, Ferrari to Philip Whitney, son of famed Glamour editor Ruth Whitney and a former executive at Money, and Muller to Maggie McComas, a former editor of Fortune magazine. Both couples have since gotten divorced.
    Not long after coming out with their romance, Muller announced that he would resign his position as editorial director, the No. 2 editorial job in the Time Inc. hierarchy, to return to writing as an editor-at-large. Though his relationship with Ferrari was a violation of company policy, both Muller and Pearlstine insisted at the time that his decision to step down had nothing to do with the affair. In November, Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson was named to succeed Muller as editorial director.
    Pearlstine says a replacement for Ferrari will be named shortly.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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