I'm probably sticking my neck out even further than usual, but I'll do it anyway. It would appear that the rejection of celebrity-based journalism we are witnessing in Britain with the decline of red-top newspapers is being echoed in the States.
Women's Wear Daily reports that the ailing US supermarket check-out weekly, Star, is having more problems. According to "sources close to the magazine", the title will not make its 1.5m rate base for the first half of this year, and is considering another rate-base reduction, to as low as 1.2m, for next year.
In other words the purveyor of news and entertainment tittle-tattle is finding it hard to keep hold of a dwindling audience. Sales have been slipping away for years as readers either trade "up" to People or Us , or simply turn their backs on buying printed magazines when they read endless celebrity gossip on the net.
Clearly, Star's Florida-based owner - American Media Inc - is going through a bad patch just now. Earlier this week I reported that it is to close its Weekly World News next month. Now comes the revelation that Star has been selling only 600,000 newsstand copies a week (plus about 600,000 subscription copies), since editor-in-chief Candace Trunzo took over the title in April. In the same month American Media announced that Star would lower its rate base to 1.35m for the second half of the year. But it now looks as if it could miss the lowered circulation guarantee.
American Media also owns the National Enquirer, another title that has seen its sales collapse. It is noticeable that the websites for both Star and the Enquirer are "unavailable/under construction", so gossip-chasing surfers cannot get their fix from either magazine online.
What all this tends to suggest is that the cash-for-trash journalistic market is going out of fashion on both sides of the Atlantic. People are obviously fed up with reading about and seeing endless pictures of Lindsay, Paris and Britney. Hooray for that.
