With longtime general manager Kent Brownridge on his way to retirement, Jann Wenner will need a new bad cop to his (moderately) good cop. The early money is on Gary Armstrong, Wenner Media's chief marketing officer.

"My nickname for him was Dr. Evil," media commentator Simon Dumenco once said of Wenner Media's Kent Brownridge, "because there is actually an admirably playful edge to his evilness." For 31 years, Brownridge has been Jann Wenner's businessman and hatchet man — the guy who took Jann and Jane's little San Francisco rock magazine and built it into a significant publisher, and the guy who keeps all the Wenner trains running on time, occasionally by firing a conductor or two. "[H]e is the soul — the very moral center — of the magazine business laid bare," Dumenco said in that same interview with the Times. "Other grandees, like Jann, try to disguise their ruthlessness with charm and smoke and mirrors, but Kent, God love him, just lets it hang out."