—Experience helps: Flanders has spent the past three years as president of Freedom, an owner of local TV stations and newspapers. As a sign that Flanders knows something about handling brands that have seemingly been passed by time, he was tapped to serve as chairman and CEO of the Columbia House Company, the discount music retailer, in 1999. At the time, he was brought on to take over the entity that would be created through the combination online retailer CDNow and Columbia House. In March 2000, Flanders convinced Columbia House to cancel the deal, feeling that the merger somehow wasn’t right. With that deal dead, AOL Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and Sony Corporation, then 50/50 joint owners of Columbia House, looked to Flanders to concentrate on fixing what was left of Columbia House. Flanders’ company bio clams he ultimately returned the company to profitability and at the direction of the board, he negotiated a leveraged buyout of the company by The Blackstone Group in June 2002. Based on that history, speculation is that Flanders could contrive a similar outcome for Playboy.