Awkward Questions For...Kent Brownridge

How is water polo like the magazine business? Kent Brownridge can tell you. Brownridge is the new CEO of Alpha Media, the company that owns Maxim and Blender magazines, and that, until he and Quadrangle Partners took it over last month, was known as Dennis Publishing. Before that, he spent three decades as consigliere to Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner. See what he has to say about headhunters, meth rings, and whether he's really looking to take revenge on his old boss.

You retired when you left Wenner Media. Why did you decide to go back to work?

I just hated being retired. I got lonely, I got bored, and I decided I'd made a terrible mistake. And I missed New York. I had this beautiful farm, really beautiful. But you know what? So what if it's beautiful. If you miss New York and you miss your friends, you're not going to be happy.

I also had a lot of trouble with my barn help. After the fourth one of 'em turned out to be a drug addict...

They were running a meth ring, right?

Yes! [Laughs] All of these things conspired to cause me to come to the conclusion of, "Fuck it."

What other companies did you look at before buying Dennis?

Dennis was the first one we looked at. And they went, "Go away, it's not for sale." But after the initial process of looking at Dennis with my friends at Quadrangle, they said, "You got any time, Kent?" And I said, "Yeah, I've got plenty of time."

So we looked at a bunch of things that we never even got to the bidding stage on. Then the Dennis thing came back again in a different form. It came back the form of somebody who had actually contracted to buy it but was looking for a backer to get the money to fulfill the contract they'd made. He was looking for money to back his purchase and he wanted to make a profit on that -- as in, he'd agreed to pay ten dollars for it, and he wanted twelve dollars from us. So that one didn't work.

Of course we were deeply involved in the Time4 Media and Parenting Group deal. My hunch is we came out as the number two bidder on that, but we were in that to the end. And we looked at Primedia.

And is the plan to add more?

The Quadrangle guys asked me just last week about something that was for sale. And I told them, look guys, it's flattering that you'd ask, and of course I'll help, but I've got my hands full right now. Let me fix this and be in a position to make you a lot of money. Six months from now, hopefully I'll have this going in the right direction. But we'll never launch anything. Private equity doesn't do that.

So sure, if something came on the market that we felt was right, we would look at it, and maybe if it looked good we'd even buy that, but all that is conditional on something coming on the market. It's not something you can force.

Why did you fire Maxim's editor in chief, Jimmy Jellinek, and replace him with James Kaminsky?

[Declining to comment on the first part of the question] Jim Kaminsky is a great editor. Solid track record, smart, and, as they said in The Music Man, he knows the territory. Karen Danziger, the only headhunter in the editorial world that I think is worth anything, and she's worth a lot -- I love her; she's my sister, shrink, priest, whatever -- she gives me a list of people that I should go see, and on it is Jim, and I think, oh, well, Jim. And then I thought, you know, Men's Journal has really gotten great, and Jann isn't going to have anyone working for him who's not a good editor. Jim, that might not be a bad idea. So he was my first choice, but he wasn't my first idea.

My first idea was to talk to Mark Golin, and a bunch of other obvious, dumb things anyone would do. I even talked to Sarah Gray Miller. Actually, the first person I talked to, and Jim knows all of this, but the very first person I reached out to was Susan Casey. She's great. She's sexy, she's a woman who gets men, and she's out there in the middle of the ocean right now with Laird Hamilton in his quest to be the first guy to ride a 100-foot wave. So that's the story. I talked to about 25 people in all.

Mark Golin was the best guy I interviewed of all. He's so crazy, and he was completely not interested, but for that reason he was even more funny and interesting. It doesn't hurt to talk to guys that did it -- what worked, what didn't. He has some really great theories about texture. He always had something in there for the guys from MIT.

What do you have to say about all the claims that buying Dennis Publishing is your "revenge" on Jann Wenner?

When I was in college, I was a water polo player, which is a hard sport. It's basically swimming up and down the pool for an hour and a half. In water polo, there's the surface of the water and there's under the water, and there's all sorts of dirty things you can do under the water. And there were some very dirty players.

But I always said, this is so hard and you have to swim so fast, you just haven't got the energy or the time to be dirty, and if you are, some other guy's going to swim around you and get the pass.

It's the same thing here. I don't have time for revenge or anything else. This is really hard. It's harder than anything I've ever done, and this is a hard time to be doing something that's harder than anything you've ever done. I haven't got time for one 10-minute relaxation of even thinking about revenge, which, really, there's nothing to get revenge for. Every single thing I do has to go into this. I know it's going to be a success, but it's not easy.