Star Testing: The Emerging Politics of Celebrity Gossip

Abstract

first started reading the weekly celebrity magazines in 2004. After leaving my partner of eight years I moved in with my best friend and her seven-year-old son; she too had recently been through a divorce. That summer on weekends we would trek down to the local drugstore to get our fix of celebrity gossip. We’d sit on the patio in our long chairs and flip through the pages of US Weekly, Life and Style, In Touch, and Star, analyzing with great efficiency and precision the melodrama of the rich, hip, and (presently) famous. Later on that same winter Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston split up, apparently over Pitt’s developing feelings for his Mr. and Mrs. Smith costar, Angelina Jolie. Quite literally pitted against each other, one of us on “Team Aniston” and the other on “Team Jolie,” we took great pleasure in speculating about and judging the motivations and personalities involved in what was the ultimate Hollywood love triangle. Our picking up celebrity magazines that year corresponds to broader consumer trends in the United States. US Weekly, a weekly celebrity magazine owned by Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, saw a 24 percent increase in sales between June 2003 and 2004. In August 2005 the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that Bauer Publishing’s In Touch Weekly’s newsstand sales had increased nearly 50 percent, while subscriptions rose nearly 60 percent over 2004 levels (Dougherty). The biggest gain for industry standard-bearer US Weekly during this time, however, was the outstanding increase in the median household income of its readers: 40 percent, to $83,365. For the same time period, the tabloid celebrity rag Star reported a 10.7 percent increase in the medium income of its readership, to $46,910 (Granatstein). Pam McNeely of Dailey & Associates offered this explanation: “The whole celebrity fascination used to be restricted to the dirty little indulgences of the Star and The National Star Testing: The Emerging Politics of Celebrity Gossip julie a. wilson