Earlier today, after we heard rumors that on of our most cherished weekly titles, Life & Style, might be headed for semi-extinction within the pages of its brother title In Touch, we began asking around. And the rumors = credible-ish! Apparently, mild chaos reigns in the building and editor-in-chief Mark Pasetsky is out for the day. (Also apparently, mild chaos often reigns at Life & Style.) Well, you heard it here first: if Life & Style dies it will in no small part be a casualty of its dogged coverage of the latest exclusive on the epic Heidi Montag-Spencer Pratt-Lauren Conrad debacle, which Life & Style has followed with a relentlessness not seen since the Washington Post's storied pursuit of that third-rate burglary. In those days, of course, a newspaper could watch its stock take a 50% hit and feel content knowing its principles were in the right place. How times change. After the jump, a look back at some of Life & Style's recent journalistic highlights.
There was the time Spencer Pratt gave the exclusive interview dissing L.C. and slyly mentioning her sex tape. Or the time the magazine hypothesized as to Angelina's bony physique and landed at the conclusion that she wasn't eating because she was taking pills. Or the time they had an exclusive about Heidi & Spencer and hypothesized as to Angelina's bony physique in the same same issue, only that time the culprit was depression. Then there was the time Spencer Pratt gave them the exclusive interview about how he really loved Heidi. Or the time they didn't have an interview with a big star so they resourcefully made do by cobbling together clips from other interviews with said big star and also the occasional song lyric. Or the time we commemorated the magazine's 45th straight exclusive feature on Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag with a tribute like this, only slightly less positive, because we, too, counted ourselves among the naysayers, oblivious to the far-reaching implications of the iron Heidi-Spencer-L.C. triangle. Which were: oh god, yeah it's depressing.
UPDATE: We just read that L&S is performing extraordinarily well on newsstands, which makes today's rumor seem a little less credible, as does an insider's suggestion that maybe the merger will simply apply to the two Bauer title's websites. We hope the rumor gods aren't blue-balling us like that time Teen Vogue was supposed to die and then didn't because God hates us. Developing...