Try getting a copy of Los Angeles magazine last week. As word spread of Amy Wallace’s controversial profile of Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, the September issue quickly sold out at newsstands and supermarkets in showbiz heavy parts of the city. Also bombarded was the magazine’s Web site, which received so many hits that the server crashed.

It was the perfect piece to capture maximum attention, detailing how Bart made racist remarks and tried to sell a movie script. Better yet, there was an immediate response: The day the story came out, Bart was suspended by Variety’s parent company, Cahners Business Information.

It was the kind of PR-blitz that many at the magazine long have been waiting for a chance to offer local readers a new look at the 40-year-old city monthly that has had a few up-and-down years.

“The attention of the Peter Bart piece I hope will in fact bring attention to the entire magazine and all that we’ve accomplished in the last six or seven months,” said Editor-In-Chief Kit Rachlis. “(I think) we were slowly changing people’s perception of ourselves and that the magazine was slowly being taken more seriously.”

Once one of the nation’s most popular city magazines, with ad-laden issues of 250 to 500 glossy pages, the publication began to suffer during the recession of the early 1990s. By 1997, Los Angeles was losing $5 million a year.

It also had to contend with an ever-changing roster of owners and editors with different visions of what the publication should be. Walt Disney Co. came to own Los Angeles when it purchased Capital Cities/ABC in 1996. Under Disney, the magazine was published by Fairchild Publications. Four years later, it was sold to Emmis Communications Corp. for a rumored $20 million.

Losing local bent

“(The earlier) Los Angeles magazine was the one that sort of figured out that people in L.A. didn’t want The New Yorker,” said Lew Harris, who was an editor from 1974 to 1995. “They wanted a restaurant guide and a weekend-getaway guide,” he said. “We did a lot of good pieces but they weren’t the cover story. You got inside and you found this stuff.”

Harris said the magazine appears to be returning to its roots. The Bart story, he said, “was the kind of thing we were doing all the time. They’ve sort of come back and learned some of the lessons.”

That evolution has taken several years, said Publisher Liz Miller, who joined the publication in 1997.

“I hate to impugn the old magazine (in the 90s) but I guess what I can say is that it didn’t really reflect the sophisticated and upscale nature of the market,” she said. “It was plastic surgery ads. It was a lot of unattractive local ads.”

Under New York-based Fairchild, the magazine was redesigned and made into a more stylish package, but one that lacked serious content, Miller said. Last year, Rachlis, formerly a senior projects editor at the Los Angeles Times, was hired to provide some credibility.

“The magazine, under Fairchild, showed all the strain of a magazine dictated 2,000 to 3,000 miles away by people in New York who don’t know Los Angeles,” said Rachlis, a New Yorker who earlier put in five years at the LA Weekly as editor-in-chief.

Looking at content

“It has become less esoteric and more journalistic,” said Valerie Muller, senior vice president of print services for MediaCom, the media buying unit of Grey Global Group. “That’s a good thing…because I think people read more for content, especially as the Internet world evolves and more and more information is available.”

Los Angeles magazine has been slowly climbing out of the circulation hole it fell into in the early 1990s, not helped at the time by one-time rival Buzz. (Los Angeles purchased Buzz in 1998.) Subscriptions for the six-month period ended June 30 stood at 151,105 and average monthly single-copy sales were 23,715. That’s up from 118,342 subscriptions and 20,719 in single copy sales during the like period in 1995.

But subscriptions fell to 144,235 in June, down from 155,417 in January. Newsstand sales, however, exceeded 26,000 copies in May and June, up from 24,210 in January.

While magazines nationwide have struggled to keep advertisers this year, Los Angeles magazine’s ad revenues through the October issue are up 13 percent over the like year-earlier period, Miller said.

“It goes more to the theory of 80 percent of spending is with 20 percent of your best customers and often your best customers can be identified on a local, rather than a national, basis,” said MediaCom’s Muller.

While experiencing a drop in national ads, the magazine’s local ads have gone “way, way up,” Miller said.

“The local advertising has really embraced the product,” she said, adding that the upscale crowd targeted by Los Angeles magazine has been relatively unscathed by the current economic slump.

Miller said the magazine expects to bring in $2.1 million in net profits this year. She says it’s been profitable since early 2000.

Once filled by freelance writers, Los Angeles has invested in two senior writers, Jesse Katz and Amy Wallace, both former Los Angeles Times reporters.

When Rachlis offered Wallace a job last fall, she took a leap of faith.

“I was at the Los Angeles Times…and L.A. Magazine was a place where I was going to be able to get in on the ground floor to make it a great city or regional magazine,” Wallace said. “But I knew there would be some people who would say, ‘You’re doing what? You’re going where?'”

Wallace was confident that the magazine would prove itself as a news source. “Just this issue has already established itself as a very different product than what (the magazine) was,” she said.