In late October 2010, CurtCo Media announced that Michalene Busico — formerly executive editor of Entrepreneur, deputy features editor of the LA Times, food editor of the New York Times for five years before that — was joining Robb Report as its newly created deputy editor under editorial director Bruce Wallin. The hire is now a small node in a larger story: where the Spring Street Project memo committee actually went.
Then
Busico was a 25-year publishing veteran when she landed at Robb Report. The Malibu-based luxury-lifestyle title pitched itself as the “journal of connoisseurship,” covering dining, fashion, home decor, health, and the other beats that publication used to define “luxury” before that term meant something different. The deputy editor role was new, and Busico’s brief, per the press release, was to develop feature articles and broaden the magazine’s editorial range. CurtCo Media’s announcement framed her hire as a substantial editorial upgrade.
The interesting LA-media subtext, which the original FishbowlLA post didn’t dwell on but is worth noting in retrospect: Busico was one of the sixteen names on the Spring Street Project memo committee — the 2006 LA Times internal report that diagnosed the paper’s web problems years before the broader industry collapse made them unfixable. By the time of the Robb Report hire, more than half the committee members had moved on from the Times in one direction or another.
Now
Busico continued at Robb Report through the rest of the 2010s, contributing to the magazine’s expansion into events, digital, and lifestyle franchise extensions. She subsequently moved into senior editorial roles at related luxury and lifestyle publications and consulting work in the high-end media space. CurtCo Media sold Robb Report to Penske Media Corporation in 2018, and the title is now part of the PMC lifestyle portfolio alongside Variety and The Hollywood Reporter — meaning Busico’s career has, like several others on the Spring Street Project list, eventually intersected with PMC’s gravitational pull on entertainment-adjacent publishing.
Bruce Wallin remained in senior editorial roles at Robb Report through the PMC transition before transitioning to consulting and content-strategy work. The 2010 hire that the original FishbowlLA post flagged as a Bay-Times-veteran-landing-at-luxury-mag story turns out, in retrospect, to be part of the broader migration of the city’s print talent — Spring Street Project alumni in particular — into a small set of consolidated remaining publishers.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: October 2010 snapshot