«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

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.

-The Economist
June 17 2009