Starving to Death on $200 Million is James Ledbetter's mock-heroic chronicle of the magazine that lived large and died young - the wild dreams, the sudden success, the wanton excesses, the fatal hemorrhage. From his vantage point as one of The Standard's top editors, he saw up close how it succumbed to the same gold-rush fever as the Internet businesses it was supposed to be chronicling, realizing too late that he had been infected as well.
But the excesses need not have been fatal; other lavish media organizations have thrived for years despite their spendthrift ways. But as Ledbetter pursued the whys and wherefores of The Standard's demise, he found himself pulled into the business equivalent of a detective story: Did the magazine die because it was reckless - as in an overdose? Or did it die because someone wanted it dead - as in a murder?

James Ledbetter was a top editor at The Industry Standard for three years, first as the magazine's New York bureau chief and then as the editor of The Industry Standard Europe. In the mid 1990s he wrote the influential "Press Clips" column for The Village Voice, and he is currently the business editor of Time magazine's European edition. He lives in London