People (magazine)
This is about the U.S. magazine; People is also the name of an unrelated U.K. magazine.
People is a weekly
American magazine of
celebrity and
human interest stories, published by
Time Inc..
As of 2006, it has a circulation of 3.73 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion.
[People who need people, a July 2006 article from Variety magazine] It was named "Magazine of the Year" by
Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation and advertising.
[Martha Nelson Named Editor, The People Group, a January 2006 Time Warner press release]The magazine runs a roughly 50/50
[The ratio, according to Variety, is 53% to 47%] mix of celebrity and human interest stories, a ratio it has maintained, according to its editors, since 2001.
People's editors claim to refrain from printing pure
celebrity gossip, enough so to lead celebrity publicists to propose exclusives to the magazine, evidence of what one staffer calls it a "publicist-friendly strategy."
has a website, http://people.aol.com/people/, which focuses exclusively on celebrity news.
is perhaps best known for its yearly special issues naming "The 50 Most Beautiful People", "The Best and Worst Dressed", and "The
Sexiest Man Alive".
The magazine maintains
editorial bureaus in
Chicago,
Los Angeles,
New York City,
Washington, D.C.,
London,
Austin (Texas), and
Miami (Florida).
was cofounded by
Dick Durrell[Founder of People Magazine from a University of Minnesota website] as a spin-off of the "People" page in
Time magazine. It's first managing editor,
Richard Stolley, characterized the magazine as::"getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be in it. Our focus is on people, not issues."
[People's Premiere, a March 1974 story from Time magazine]It debuted in 1974, with a
March 4th issue featuring actress
Mia Farrow, then starring in the movie
The Great Gatsby, on the cover. That issue also featured stories on
Gloria Vanderbilt,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the wives of U.S.
Vietnam veterans who are
Missing In Action.
In
1996 Time, Inc. launched a Spanish-language edition entitled
People en Español.
In
1997 the magazine introduced a version targeted at teens called
Teen People. However, on
July 27,
2006, the company annouced it would shutter publication of
Teen People effective immediately. The last issue to be released will be for
September 2006. There were numerous reasons cited for the publication shutdown, including a downfall in ad pages, competition from both other teen-oriented magazines and the internet along with a decrease in circulation numbers. [
1]
In
Australia, the localised version of
People is titled
Who because of a pre-existing
lad's mag published under the title
People.
In a July 2006
Variety article,
Janice Min,
Us Weekly editor-in-chief, blamed
People for the increase in cost to publishers of celebrity photos::"They are among the biggest spenders of celebrity photos in the industry....One of the first things they ever did, that led to the jacking up of photo prices, was to pay $75,000 to buy pictures of
Jennifer Lopez reading
Us magazine, so
Us Weekly couldn't buy them.:"That was the watershed moment that kicked off high photo prices in my mind. I had never seen anything like it. But they saw a competitor come along, and responded. It was a business move, and probably a smart one."
reportedly paid $4.1 million for newborn photos of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, the child of
Angelina Jolie and
Brad Pitt.
The photos set a single-day traffic record for their website, attracting 26.5 million page views.
