O’Conall Street

I posted last week about the decline in lad mag sales in these parts and how celebrity blogs and YouTube were capturing the gossip hungry and flesh crazy young men.

 The Sunday Times Business had an interesting piece on the US edition of OK! Magazine and its impressive young female editor, Sarah Ivens. Turns out she has grown sales of the celebrity gossip magazine by 54% in the last year establishing it as one of the leading weekly magazines in the US where they fill the gap traditionally occupied by the red tops in Britain and Ireland. Ivens claims to have readers not just on the east and west coasts but also in the mid west where Pop Idol is country and celebrities ride around in pick ups. But her real claim is to have mitigated the impact of the numerous celebrity gossip blogs doing so much damage to her more established competitors such as People, US Weekly or Star Magazine. Blogs like PerezHilton.com which come complete with its own ‘citizen paparrazi’ and gossip on just about everyone you could imagine (it broke the tragic death of Spanish footballer Antonio Puerta as fast as any sports site I checked). Or TMZ.com which reports, picture and all, that Amy Winehouse is not in rehab but toasting herself in the Carribean, although no mention of her father in law’s comments  reported widely in the mainstream media yesterday.

So from the man who secretly sneaks a monthly glance at the glossies respect to Ms Ivens and her small New York based team at OK!. Once a week is surely the right dose of hot gossip. Having this stuff online and in real time 24-7 is cannot be good for you. Or as Dr Paxman might say when criticising 24 hour news, there is no analysis….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 6:14 am and is filed under Celebrity, Consumer, Music, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.