''Bachelor'' also-ran Trista will be ''Bachelorette''

Trista Rehn may have lost Alex Michel to rival Amanda Marsh on this spring’s ”The Bachelor,” but she’ll get another shot at romance in January, and this time, she gets to be the one doling out roses. She’ll star in a gender-switched version of the reality hit, to be called ”The Bachelorette,” and get to pick from 25 suitors, ABC execs announced Wednesday at the summer TV critics’ conclave in Pasadena.

Rehn, a 29-year-old physical therapist, told the TV critics that she was ”very happy with the outcome,” despite being initially upset that Michel chose Marsh, the 23-year-old event planner, over her. ”Now that I’m on the other side of the rose, so to speak, I hope to find an ambitious and confident man who has a great sense of humor and is a strong conversationalist,” she said. ”While physical attractiveness is good, chemistry is far more important to me. I’d like to think we’d still be making each other laugh 50 years from now.”

ABC plans to air additional six-episode runs of ”The Bachelor” in the fall and the spring, with new bachelors and new female hopefuls. Meanwhile, ABC execs said that, while Michel and Marsh are currently living apart — he’s working as a management consultant in Los Angeles, and she’s in Kansas City, where she took an on-air job at a radio station that the execs said was too good to pass up — ”they are definitely still together.”