America's thriving gossip magazines
Rags to riches
Jun 18th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

One corner of the print-news industry is relatively healthy

FOR seven of the past eight weeks the front cover of Us Weekly magazine has featured salacious stories about Jon and Kate Gosselin. The Gosselins, who have eight children including sextuplets, are the stars of an obscure American reality-TV programme that briefly became the most watched show on cable. Sensing a surge of interest, other celebrity magazines have piled in with reports of marital disharmony. Even in a recession, tittle-tattle sells.

Buoyed by recession-resistant food, pharmaceutical and shampoo advertisements, gossip magazines have lost fewer advertising pages in the past year than business or news magazines, according to a tally by Mediaweek. The two biggest, People and Us Weekly, each sold more copies last year than they did in 2001. In a world of fragmenting audiences they boast an enormous reach. Fully 43m Americans, about two-thirds of them women, flick through a copy of People each week.


This is odd, because the forces blamed for the decline of print news are no less potent in the celebrity sector. Celebrity news has its own online aggregators, several of them linked to web portals, such as omg!, the gossip arm of Yahoo!. The self-publicising Perez Hilton leads a legion of bloggers. Tweets, mobile-phone alerts and gossipy television shows (there are five, up from three in 2000) provide much more timely information about the lives of the beautiful than do magazines. There is more direct competition, too, with three big glossy magazines having launched since 2002.

It may be that the new entrants have simply mopped up excess interest in the doings of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Larry Hackett, the editor of People, reckons that the public appetite for entertainment news was underserved until recently. Far from harming the established publications, the multimedia gossip barrage may be driving readers to check scurrilous rumours with them.

The field is probably too crowded. None of the three new publications—In Touch, Life & Style and OK!—sold more than a million copies a week on average last year. The turbulent economy has shaken lucrative news-stand sales in particular. As the weaker publications struggle, though, the strongest ones are expanding boldly into new platforms and products. People has launched an iPhone application and its website receives 13m unique visitors per month, according to comScore, a research firm. Its empire includes a fashion portal, a Spanish-language magazine, a country issue, puzzle books and a pets website, all written in the same reassuring style.

However far-flung their operations, celebrity publishers know they must drive traffic to the weekly magazine, where the real money is still to be made. The best websites offer titbits, updates and quotes. When it comes to longer articles and scoops, though, online readers are firmly steered to the news-stand with notes that begin, “To find out more…”. Janice Min, the editor-in-chief of Us Weekly, reckons the content of her magazine and its associated website overlap by no more than 15%. “Why would you post your entire cover story online?” she asks.
http://www.economist.com/...d=13871850

43 million Americans believing blatant lies every week.

purplesweat said:

But that means you aren't worrying about the economy, Congress, world events and all that "BAD" news . . .