Not the business it used to be. (Photo: flickr.com/johnf49)

The sheer churn-and-burn of the startup scene can be grueling: Some hot new company is always ascendant, and some formerly hot new company is always headed for the ash heap of history. Ever wanted to just chuck it all and retreat to the more stable environs of an old-fashioned profession like, say, magazines?

Now, before you begin laughing, its worth first considering this Ad Age paen to this year's honorees for the magazine's A-List Awards, which asks, "Would You Rather Own a Magazine or a Digital Startup?" The subtitle clarifies, "That is not a trick question," and the article goes on to point out that for every Newsweek, there's a Marie Claire doing a brisk business in ad pages. The conclusion: "You probably won't read about that on TechCrunch or Mashable, but you're reading it right here."

Felix Salmon promptly replied with a long, measured answer that basically amounts to "digital startups for $800, Alex."

Despite his background as a contributor to and lover of magazines, they aren't exactly easy to make pay. For one thing, if you think your recruiting costs are difficult to bear, imaginine having to pay an actual printer every month. Sure, Color burned through a lot of cash--but part of what's so appalling about that debacle is how unnecessary it was. As Mr. Salmon points out, magazine economics are mean as hell, in that any revenue over and above your costs is profit--but it's hard to shave anything off those costs. You can take away the town cars and the Snapples, but in the grand scheme of things that's basically nickels and dimes.

Nor is who wins necessarily a matter of simple Darwinism. Mr. Salmon points to Ad Age's picks and notes:

There’s no one on the planet who could have predicted even a few years ago that Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, and Traditional Home were particularly well positioned for this kind of glory. There’s something scary and random about the magazine industry — and in the world of magazines, failure hurts, much more than it does in Silicon Valley, where it’s a veritable badge of pride.

Oh yeah, and then there's the fact that, while rumors of print's death have been greatly exaggerated, the long-term potential isn't what it used to be:

Venture capitalists don’t mind pouring money into digital startups, because the value of those startups, if things go well, will rise ten dollars for every dollar the VC spends. That’s an attractive business to chase. In the magazine industry, by contrast, it’s still very much possible to make profits. But how much is your magazine worth? If you make $10 million a year, but the value of your magazine is $40 million lower each year than it was the previous year, you’re not in a good position.

If you're going to buy a lottery ticket, might as well buy the one that's going to pay big money.

The Muellers’ similarities are more than superficial. The twins, who are 27 and stand 5'5", share the same bank account. They share the same calendar. They share the same curriculum vitae. The same sexual orientation (gay), brownstone (Prospect Heights) and taste in boyfriends (“over 30”). They share the same profession, and the same specialty (interactive design). They even, in a manner of speaking, share an identity. Email the Brothers Mueller at their shared account, and the only way to tell which Mueller is responding is by whose name shows up first in the signature: Nate & Kirk versus Kirk & Nate.

“We have this little notation,” said Kirk.

“Some people figured it out,” chimed in Nate, who, along with his brother, seems unburdened by matters of selfhood.

One stutters trying to figure out how to address them. “The Brothers, the Brothers Mueller, or ‘the twins,’ or ‘the boys,’” Kirk said.

In the year and a half since the Brothers got their master degrees from RISD—sharing the podium as commencement speakers in 2010—and moved to New York, they have created iPad apps for Martha Stewart and e-books for Vanity Fair and Bon Appetit. Coming soon are a political website for The New Yorker and an iPad app for Newsweek. Whereas most graphic and user-interface designers tend to hand off the technical work, the brothers do it all, relying on Nate’s speed in programming and Kirk’s facility with design.

Their first media world collaboration, a one-off iPad app for Martha Stewart called Boundless Beauty, won the Society of Publication Designers “Tablet App of the Year” award. Shortly after, Time magazine called it the cover of the year for featuring an interactive time-lapse video of one of Martha’s prize peonies, a 10-hour shoot compressed into 10 seconds. The SPD Award dinner was on a Friday. (“We have these crushed velvet pumps,” said Nate. “Loafers,” Kirk corrected. “And it’s the only time you could wear something like that,” Nate finished.) The following Monday, they got a call from Scott Dadich, Condé Nast’s vice president of digital magazine development, about revamping the company’s e-book operation.

“At this point in media, they have a bit of a lore, like, ‘Oh, the Mueller Brothers are coming!” said Melissa Lafsky, the launch editor for Newsweek’s updated iPad edition, which is slated to debut on Jan. 23, with the Brothers’ help. “When they come into the office, people love it because they’re so striking to look at. Everyone does a double-take because they’re so handsome and well-dressed and there are two of them. They’re a presence. They’re sort of the modern Jewish mother’s dream.”

“When Martha met them, her first question was whether they would appear on The Martha Stewart Show,” seconded Gael Towey, longtime chief creative and editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Not everything about the duo is as identical as it first appears, however. After the first half hour, it comes into focus that Nate’s face is more of an oval. The bridge of Kirk’s nose is more narrow, his physique more slight. Nate’s voice is deeper and a few decibels more nasal—a blessed discovery you don’t make until the next day. “It’ll be hard to transcribe,” they warned, eyeing The Observer’s digital recorder.

“Our collective identity is what matters,” said Kirk.

“We don’t get offended if people can’t tell us apart,” added Nate.

“Gilbert and George, the art duo, they call themselves ‘living sculptures.’ We like the idea of instead of being ‘living decorative objects,’” explained Kirk, gamely.

Before speaking, the twins tend to turn, birdlike, to face each other, often hesitating until they’ve reached some sort of wordless consensus before offering a response.

For all their attention-getting ensembles, the brothers retain a Midwestern equanimity from a youth spent in the suburbs of Akron. “Because we were originally raised Catholic, we have this running joke that for these twin gay boys in Akron, Ohio, our outlet to ornamentation and beautiful things was going to Mass,” said Kirk, recalling that as altar boys they fought over who got to wear the gold sash.

As budding young artists, they read up on the Aesthetics Movement and admired Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp.

They came out at different times—Nate first, Kirk years later, but never officially to each other. “I guess we always assumed that the other one was going through the same things,” they wrote in an email. “We would have been more surprised to find out the other one was straight.”

Even among unflappable New Yorkers, the Brothers Mueller tend to draw stares. In the subway or the elevator at 4 Times Square, “we get stopped once a week by people who say, ‘Have you been interviewed for a magazine or newspaper?’ and we just go, ‘Nooo,’” Kirk said, demurely shaking his head.

“That’s what’s fun. They see you maybe as objects? So we get people touching us,” said Nate, miming a hand on his arm, “saying, ‘Do you know that you’re twins?!’ It’s great.”

Indeed, the brothers are just as affable fielding questions about their interactive wallpaper, which was on exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum and featured stylized versions of a viral molecule, appearing and disappearing between delicate rows of damask ("They're STD viruses!" explained Kirk), as they are entertaining questions about fetish play.

Identical twins tend to receive unsolicited queries of a sexual nature, and in 2010, when Bel Ami, the gay porn production company, introduced the world to the Peters twins, muscle-bound teenage Czechs who begat the word “twincest,” such interrogations took a turn for the lurid.

“It used to upset us a little at first,” Kirk said. “But now we’re very playful with it.”

“My favorite is using ambiguous language,” Nate added.

“They’ll ask questions about us, like do we date the same guy or do you sleep with the same guy,” explained Kirk. “So we’ll purposefully answer, like, ‘Not usually,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ at the same time. Nate will say, ‘Not really,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ It’ll explode their head.”

“And then we walk away,” finished Nate.

Later, they offered a less ambiguous answer by email: “We don’t think there is a need to experiment with something like that when there’s a whole city full of beautiful people.”

As for whether they would date the same man simultaneously, however, they added dryly, “I think it’s the German in us that seeks out efficiency, so what would be more efficient than the both of us dating one person?”

As is befitting a proper wunderkind, sorry wunderkinder, the outside world’s discovery of the Brothers was a matter of happenstance. Martha Stewart was working to develop its first digital issue as part of the early development group for Adobe's new InDesign for the iPad software,  and Ms. Towey contacted RISD president John Maeda.

“The director of the program calls us and says you should probably come down here since they’re looking for iPad people and you’re probably the best iPad people here,” Kirk recalled. The Muellers went to lunch with Ms. Towey and her husband, a fellow designer named Stephen Doyle. “We had a great time and then we looked them up and we were so glad that we didn’t know exactly how big of design powerhouses they are because we would have been nervous wrecks,” Nate said.

“When the brothers walked into the room, I was immediately smitten,” Ms. Towey remembered. “They handed me one résumé, and that did it for me—one résumé. They were clearly smart at marketing themselves. I thought of the Starn twins, and figured that these guys were on their way to stardom.”

Not only did the brothers prove adept at the technical side—finding bugs in the software before developers at Adobe even knew they were there, Ms. Towey said—they made a number of critical design suggestions. Along with other team members, they insisted the peony should be shuffled to the front of the issue.

“They were going to put it in one of the stories and we said, It should go on the cover,” whispered Nate.

“We should be the first to have an animated cover,” concurred Kirk, adding, “The tools were still being developed. The cover almost didn’t go out the door because of some technical difficulties. But we finally got it out.”

After the success of Boundless Beauty, Condé tapped the brothers to make their e-book process more efficient and keep the branding more in line with their individual titles. “They always try and get us full-time,” said Kirk, who also mentioned helping Mr. Dadich with the beta version of Adobe's software. The Brothers, however, prefer working under the Studio Mercury umbrella, where they also dabble in work for the Guggenheim and the industrial design magazine Core 77.

After setting up e-book production workflows at Conde, “once a title wanted to launch a book, instead of taking a matter of weeks, it took a matter of a week,” said Kirk.

With the New Yorker political website, which is slated to launch this week, the Brothers are employing a Studio Mercury specialty called a “liquid layout,” which easily adjusts from “very large monitors all the way down to the iPad, so it scales seamlessly,” as Nate put it.

It’s easy to see how duo’s cooperative spirit is embraced by publishing design teams, but the world isn’t really built for two separate bodies who want to perceived as one unit. “Our accountant hates us,” Nate admitted.

“If we could, we would get one tax ID number,” Kirk added, wistfully. “And one Social Security number.”

Then he volunteered a mid-century cautionary tale of parents who bucked the standard practice of separating twins to foster individual growth. “The story was that because these twins weren’t separated, they didn’t develop separate identities so they became murderers … and gay,” Kirk said. “Society was saying if you don’t have separate identities—”

“—all this bad stuff can happen,” said Nate.

Although the Brothers have shared a wardrobe since high school, they didn’t start dressing alike until grad school, when, they explained, “we merged our working identity under one name.” That meant a combined Facebook profile and Twitter account, in addition to the email. In their old apartment in Park Slope, they had to institute a morning check-in about what they’d be wearing, to avoid showing up in the exact same ensemble instead of slight variations. The problem was solved with a shared “dressing area” in their Prospect Heights brownstone.

“We often wonder if throughout the majority of the day we think the exact same thoughts,” said Kirk. Or maybe it was Nate.

ntiku@observer.com

Lotus pose.

Time magazine was almost finished closing its latest issue, which will hit stands Friday, when the news of Steve Jobs' death broke. So for the first time in what AdWeek says may have been three decades, the magazine stopped the presses. Mr. Jobs' image now graces the front cover for the eighth and perhaps final time. Its entire 'feature well' will also be devoted to covering his legacy.

Businessweek and Newsweek also have special issues planned, the former an ad-free tribute. Wired.com's striking black homepage is also still ad-fee--featuring only an image of Mr. Jobs and quotes mourning his passing--just as it did last night. But Time's issue is of particular note because it will feature an essay from Walter Issacson, Mr. Jobs' biographer, who just had his deadline pushed up by Simon & Schuster.

Mr. Issacson's essay is behind a paywall, but Fortune.com has excerpted the part where he describes the day Mr. Jobs first tried to pitch him on writing his life's story.

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from him. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I'd worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn't heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He'd be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted, instead, to take a walk so we could talk.

That seemed a bit odd. I didn't yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.

But I later realized that he had called me just before he was going to be operated on for cancer for the first time. As I watched him battle that disease, with an awesome intensity combined with an astonishing emotional romanticism, I came to find him deeply compelling, and I realized how much his personality was ingrained in the products he created. His passions, demons, desires, artistry, devilry and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business, so I decided to try to write his tale as a case study in creativity.

It seems Mr. Jobs' love of walking was a constant. As Daring Fireball's John Gruber noted poignantly in this tribute, even four months ago at Apple's WWDC conference, Mr. Gruber noticed "fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels" of Mr. Jobs' uniform gray New Balance 993s.

Image via Gadling

Betabeat received an email this morning from Grant Martin, Editor-in-Chief at the travel site Gadling, alerting us that Jerry Guo, the notorious Newsweek writer and startup scammer, had a troubled history with AOL as well. From Mr. Martin's email:

Jerry was a blogger for Gadling for a couple of years and then was removed in November of 2008. Curiously, his bio photo on Gadling was of him holding a panda.

Jerry was terminated because he
was taking old, past published posts and tucking them into the recent (but out of sight) queue so that our payment system would automatically sweep through and double pay him.

That same week we found out that he was trying to farm out blog posts for our site for $5 each on elance. Still have the screenshot on that one.

Jerry's tenure at Gadling was full of him trying to work our system, squeeze us for more money and earn free travel. I'm glad that he's gone, but I wish that I had been more proactive in reaching out to his other/future editors.

In talking with editors at Newsweek and The Atlantic for this story, Betabeat often heard the same refrain. Typically editors regretted not doing more to out Mr. Guo as a bad seed, but felt it was wiser to sweep things under the rug and protect their own publication. This allowed Mr. Guo to hop from one big name to the next. Since 2008 he has written for the NY Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs.

Check Out Our Slideshow of Jerry Guo's Adventures Around the World>>

Mr. Guo

UPDATE: AOL Editor who fired Mr. Guo in 2008 writes to say he regrets not doing more to warn others. Story here.

-- --

Jerry Guo considers himself a modern nomad. The 24-year-old Chinese-American stays in a different apartment each month, couch surfing or subletting, whatever works best. “Moving around makes it easier to find cool new venues,” Mr. Guo explained. His recently launched startup company, Grouper, sends six users on platonic group outings to lux hotspots around New York, so maintaining a fresh supply of trendy locales is key to Mr. Guo’s success.

"I like to keep moving," Mr. Guo told Betabeat, hunching down into a leather chair at our Midtown offices. He wore a purple sweatshirt, jeans and yellow-trimmed topsiders with no socks. Over the last two years the rakish Mr. Guo has touched down in exotic locales on practically every continent on earth. There was a rare trip inside North Korea, which Mr. Guo wrote about for the Washington Post. And the time he spent running with the rebel forces in Iran during the summer of 2009, which he chronicled in The New York Times. It was his Chinese passport that allowed him access to nations typically hostile to America*.

“Jerry is...I think the best word is irreverent,” said his co-founder at Grouper, Michael Waxman, who met Mr. Guo when the two were freshman at Yale in 2005. “After all the crazy shit he has done, he’s lucky just to be alive, so he kind of brings that to the table as an entrepreneur.” Mr. Waxman is the CTO/CEO of sorts, while Mr. Guo handles partnerships, operations and marketing. “He has the kind of charisma you can’t learn.”

Check Out Our Slideshow Adventure Around the World With Jerry Guo >>

Mr. Guo’s charisma—and his irreverence—were on stark display in the spring of 2011, when he reached out to Adam Sachs, CEO of the very successful group dating site, Ignighter. He told Mr. Sachs that he was a freelance journalist who had been commissioned to write a piece on Ignighter for The Atlantic Monthly, and sent along some of his clips from his time at Newsweek by way of credentials.

“It was really strange,” Mr. Sachs said. “He showed up to the interview with this other guy, who I later learned was his co-founder. They asked a ton of questions and we talked for maybe an hour.” A few weeks went by and Mr. Sachs heard nothing, so he emailed Mr. Guo to ask about the story. “He told me it was still being edited and that it would come out soon.” Another month or so passed. “Then all of a sudden I see Grouper.” Both companies relied on users’ social graphs to choose clusters of people they would send on group outings.

Mr. Sachs emailed editors at The Atlantic, who informed him that Mr. Guo had indeed pitched the story but that it had never been assigned. He emailed Newsweek, who told him that his complaint was just one of many they were sorting through involving Mr. Guo. Mr. Sachs was upset, but he didn’t feel threatened by Grouper, and he decided to let things go. We thought the incident warranted a closer look.

The adventure began the summer Mr. Guo graduated from Yale. “Before college, I had never been outside the country, well, except before I moved here,” Mr. Guo explained. His family moved to America when Mr. Guo was six, and he spent his youth mostly in Greer, South Carolina. He showed a aptitude for computers early on, winning an award in 2003 from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, for creating a novel spam-filtering algorithm. At Yale, he studied economics. But after college, the diligent student transformed into a globe trotting adventurer.

As Mr. Guo explained in an interview with the local blog We Are NY Tech, the day after graduation, he flew to Amsterdam, then on to Tehran, where he’d agreed to teach a class on entrepreneurship at the University of Tehran. Due to the growing unrest, the class was cancelled.

“I ended up couchsurfing for the summer, working at a local hedge fund by day while running with the Iranian youth opposition by night,” he wrote. “I started writing about my time with them, and in the process accidentally became the last Western journalist in Iran.”

Check Out Our Slideshow Adventure Around the World With Jerry Guo >>

The clips Mr. Guo landed during his summer in Tehran earned him a spot at Newsweek International, where, according to Newsweek staffers, he was personally recruited by the newly appointed Fareed Zakaria.

Mr. Guo was, depending on whom you ask, an intern, a fellow, a correspondent, a staff reporter or a compulsive liar. "He was a strange egg, that’s for sure," said a former staffer who worked with him. "He would disappear for weeks at a time, then call up saying he had an interview with Hugo Chavez or pirates in Africa. Then he would be back at the office, I would see him sleeping under his desk. People joked he was a spy."

Mr. Guo arrived at Newsweek during a troubled time. The venerable magazine was losing large sums of money and shedding staff. Talks of a takeover rattled bull-pen morale. “It was kind of crazy, for sure,” Mr. Guo told The Observer. “They needed a young guy like me who would go anywhere, produce a lot of copy and not worry too much about whether my job would still be waiting for me when I got back.”

More than 30 pieces from this time now appear on the Newsweek/Daily Beast website. They are an odd mix of reportage: international conflicts and human rights on one hand, luxury lifestyle coverage on the other. A piece on the Russian occupation of Georgia sits next to a story on a $10,000 ski trip at an five-star Helsinki hotel. A interview with Chinua Achebe on Nigeria’s future is paired with a feature on luxury hunting resorts in South Africa.

“I worked for a section at Newsweek called The Good Life,” explained Mr. Guo. “It was basically, you know, advertorial content that they would pair with some really expensive ads.” Newsweek International, short on reporters, was hungry for content and revenue. Mr. Guo would buy a plane ticket and head off. “Basically I would just do things and worry later about expensing them.”

In addition, Mr. Guo would often claim a story had been assigned in exchange for free flights, hotel stays and merchandise. “I didn’t have an apartment, so it was always nicer to be on a plane or in a hotel,” said Mr. Guo, who confirmed that he would crash under his desk during his rare visits to New York.

“Sometimes if I wanted to make a trip work, I would just figure out a way to get The Good Life involved,” he said. “So I wanted to go to Tibet and report on the conflict there with China. You couldn’t get into Tibet from the Chinese side, so I just called up this ridiculous yoga retreat on the Indian side, told them it was a piece for The Good Life, they let me stay for free and next thing you know, I’m talking with the Dali Lama about human rights.”

Both the interview with his Holiness on conditions in Tibet and “UpMarket Facing Dog,” a zippy roundup of high-end yoga spots around the globe, ran in Newsweek International.

Like many news organizations, Newsweek had a longstanding ethics policy that expressly forbid reporters from accepting flights, hotel accommodations and merchandise in exchange for coverage. But current and former Newsweek staffers who worked alongside Mr. Guo said that during his tenure at Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria changed that policy, specifically for reporters working on The Good Life section.

“It just begs the question, why did Fareed implement these new rules?” said a current Newsweek employee who worked alongside Mr. Guo. “Nobody objected, because Jerry filed good copy. It seems crazy now, but he basically just played within the absurd rules of the time.”

Mr. Zakaria emailed Betabeat to explain the change. The Good Life, he said, was “an effort to provide a service for our readers and attract new advertisers. It is quite common in that world for reporters to, say, go to a special tasting at a new restaurant or attend a weekend retreat at a new hotel. I relaxed our rules on this stuff for those two pages. In retrospect, it was a mistake—my mistake—and I regret it. We should not have been in the business of covering luxury goods—that world is so different from the traditional world of news reporting. I was always uncomfortable with it but was trying to help to help the magazine survive through tough economic times."

The fun came to an end in December of 2010, when Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast. Mr. Zakaria had left by then for a position at Time. Mr. Guo’s internship had already gone well past its allotted time, and the incoming management decided not to renew him.

A few weeks later, the complaints started to arrive. One came from the Tourism Board of Thailand, which wanted to know why they had paid for Mr. Guo and a photograher to fly to Thailand and stay at deluxe hotels. Others involved an expensive watch and a some Gore-tex gloves Mr. Guo had requested. About ten or twelve letters arrived at Newsweek’s legal department.

"After his internship ended, Newsweek International received a number of complaints about Jerry Guo, all of which were dealt with accordingly," said  Andrew Kirk, director of Public Relations at Newsweek & The Daily Beast.

Check Out Our Slideshow Adventure Around the World With Jerry Guo >>

Mr. Guo, meanwhile, had moved on to the world of tech startups. As he navigated the new scene, he continued to employ many of the tactics that had worked so well for him in the world of print media.

When Jerry Guo is nervous, he flushes red and hides his eyes behind his bangs. In a small office at Betabeat's building on West 44th Street, when we asked him about what happened with Ignighter, he looked at the floor and scratched his scarlet neck.

“I think the story here is, like, what happened to journalism,” said Mr. Guo, who had grown accustomed to exchanging coverage for access and gifts. “Coming from that world, I thought essentially, Adam wouldn't have time to talk to us and that this was a great way to get a meeting: ‘Hey I'm a writer so in return for this meeting I’ll write about your startup.’”

Mr Guo has since apologized to Mr. Sachs, who said he doesn’t see the two companies as competitors. Mr. Guo is now eager to put the lessons he learned as a news hack behind him, and focus on growing his company. “Some stats: 93% want to go on another Grouper, we've arranged 1,000+ drinks this summer, and we're already profitable,” he wrote to The Observer in a chipper email a few days after our meeting. He recently went to a secret rave in New York with a friend he met through a Grouper. And at the first New York Meetup for the prestigious startup program Y-Combinator, Mr. Guo, as he always does, made an impression.

“I really like companies doing things with online to offline,” said Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv and a new partner at Y-Combinator, speaking on stage before 800 hopeful young startup founders. “I met this startup tonight that arranges people into group dates. It’s called like, Grouper or something. That seemed very cool.” In the audience, Mr. Guo beamed from ear to ear.