Why Celebrity Magazines Should Be OK

These are not auspicious times for celebrity magazines. OK is such a shambles that its owner, Richard Desmond, yesterday saw fit to toss overboard his still-very-new editor in chief and general manager, along with practically everyone they hired. Star is part of American Media, which threats to topple over into bankruptcy at any second. In Touch and Life & Style have seen dramatic circulation losses since wholesalers forced them to raise their cover prices. Further up the food chain, People and Us Weekly are faring somewhat better, although not nearly so well as they were at the peak of the celebrity-weekly boomlet of a few years ago.

That's the bad news. Here's the good news: I predict reversals are on the way for some -- though definitely not all -- of these titles.

Some degree of market correction was inevitable after the florid overgrowth of the celebrity weekly sector that commenced in 2002 with Bonnie Fuller's makeover of Us Weekly. But the sharpness of the drop-off in sales last year owed a lot to two other factors: sky-high gas prices and the reading public's unusually sustained interest in hard news, particularly the election.

Expensive gas, as I've noted, depresses magazine sales in a number of ways: Consumers make fewer trips to he supermarket and have less money to spend when they get there, and wholesalers make fewer deliveries so that news racks are apt to be more lightly stocked. A gallon of gas currently costs a dollar and change less than it did a year ago; if prices hold, the effects should start showing up in sales figures soon.

As for the public's interest, there's ample evidence that the election of a lifetime disrupted media consumption patters; just look at the way ratings for hard-news TV programs went through the roof and stayed there. But with electoral politics giving way to governance, it's hard to imagine the public's attention won't wander back to more frivolous matters before long. One thing that would help would be a compelling new celebrity saga. Try as they might, the weeklies have had virtually no success over the past two years in finding a star (or, better yet, a pair of romantically-linked stars) with the newsstand draw of Brad & Angelina, Britney, Jessica or Nicole, all of whom seem to have figured out how to lead more boring lives of late.

Of course, that 7 cents-a-copy surcharge that two major distributors are trying to force on magazine publishers will hit the celebrity weekly category especially hard. But if it forces a couple of the weaker players to shut down, it could end up being a good thing in the long run for the survivors.