The conventional wisdom on U.S. News & World Report owner/editor-in-chief Mort Zuckerman is that he goes through editors like he used to go through girlfriends. First there's the thrilling seduction. Then the romance fades, the bickering begins, and it's the old heave-ho. But wait a minute: Mortimer is happily married now. And after recently ditching editor James Fallows (and before him Shelby Coffey III, David Gergen, and Roger Rosenblatt), Zuckerman has settled on a veteran newsweekly editor who might well be a keeper: Stephen Smith.

No doubt, Smith will run smack into many of the same problems as his predecessors. Zuckerman is notorious for parachuting into the editing process. He battled Fallows over what he perceived as the former editor's relatively thin coverage of such stories as the Versace murder, the failed GOP coup against Newt Gingrich, and the Northern Ireland peace settlement. In Smith's second week on the job, Zuckerman weighed in on a major piece on the economy by Phillip Longman and Jack Egan, swiftly changing language in a subtitle from "bubble economy" to "boom economy."

"U.S. News is Mort's baby and he will always be involved on a granular level. When he has an itch, he scratches it," says a former senior U.S. News executive. "And that can be tough on an editor."

Also tough will be Zuckerman's tight hold on the purse strings. Although the magazine's overall budget has been rising, Fallows and Zuckerman came to blows over the owner's cutbacks on bureaus and stringers, his lid on new hires, and his rejection of proposals for promotional campaigns. Aptly enough, their last fight was about money too -- the size of Fallows's severance package.

Then there is the not-so-small problem of putting out a weekly with only a handful of senior editors. As Smith walked in one door about half the magazine's top editors, most of them Fallows loyalists, were stomping out the other. Among them: top political editor Steve Waldman, his deputy Christopher Orr (and their newly hired star writer Ron Brownstein), deputy editor Stephen Budiansky, Washington Whispers editor Tim Noah, and special projects editor Lincoln Caplan.

But Smith quickly hired a couple of replacements -- Victoria Pope, former m.e. at National Journal, as an a.m.e., and Paul Bedard, of the Washington Times, as Whispers editor. And he has a couple of advantages his last four predecessors lacked. While they were all media stars, he is the first veteran newsweekly editor in that job since former Newsweek veterans Merrill "Mimi" McLoughlin and Mike Ruby co-edited U.S. News, from 1989 to 1996. The tall, preppy-looking Smith (he doesn't own a pair of blue jeans) spent five years at Newsweek, as executive editor, after seven at Time, as both writer and editor. At National Journal, where he had been editor since 1996, Smith turned a well-reported but gray magazine into a hot political book. His formula included bringing in controversial writers like Michael Kelly and redesigning the magazine.

Smith may also be be taking a cue from the much-beloved Mimi and Mike, who served nearly seven years under Zuckerman: kinder, gentler. Fallows's abrupt departure bared old rifts between the rumpled hard news types and the Ivy League big-think crowd that Fallows favored. But while Fallows came in all guns blazing, hacking at the senior staff, Smith has tried to heal the wounds by avoiding criticism of the previous regime, promising no immediate beheadings, and holding his plans close to his chest.

What kind of plans? Don't expect startling changes. U.S. News will still brandish its signature emphasis on news-you-can-use. "It's a key differentiating feature that suffuses the whole magazine," says Smith. The biggest substantive difference will likely be a shift away from those sometimes esoteric view-from-60,000-feet stories that Fallows often pushed. "I'd like to run closer to the news," Smith says. He promises investigations, too, pointing to an August 3 cover piece, "Dirty Diamonds," a riveting tale of how the FBI and some honest Moscow cops broke up a ring that was looting the Russian treasury.

Smith will also likely change the look of U.S. News. He's creating a new post of cover editor, and he wants more variety in the length of stories and more "entry points" -- boxes, charts, pictures, pullouts. In Smithspeak, the magazine needs "more bump, bump, bump."

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