The Tale Of Two Medias: People Magazine And OK! Publish First Pictures of Jennifer Lopez And Twins And Pay Millions For The Privilege While Most US Newspapers Cannot Afford The $1,000 - $2,000 A Day To Send A Reporter On Presidential Candidate Planes
(1) followup

Philip M. Stone March 27, 2008

If there is one sector of print media that is doing pretty well these days it is magazines – US consumer magazines increased ad revenues by 7% last year – and those concentrating on entertainment and sports personalities did particularly well. And they’re paying millions of dollars for exclusive coverage of celebrity events. But only a very few newspapers have budgets allowing for their own daily coverage of the Presidential candidates.

People has published its 12-page spread with the first pictures of Jennifer Lopez and her twin babies which cost the Time Inc., magazine some $6 million for US and Latin American rights. OK! is said to have paid a similar fee for the rest of the world and is out with its 15-page spread which it calls a "World Exclusive”, apparently “world” to them excludes the US and Latam! but, hey, let’s not get picky.

Will they get their money’s worth through extra premium-priced advertising and increased newsstand sales? If Internet access is anything to go by then the magazines will do just fine. People .com on the first day it displayed some pictures set a new record for its web site with four million unique visitors, about double the normal traffic.

And OK! isn’t done yet. It has reportedly won an auction to pay a record £3.2 million ($6.4 million) for the rights to England footballer Wayne Rooney’s wedding this summer. OK! is owned by Richard Desmond who also publishes the Daily Express newspaper, and that newspaper gave as good an explanation of any why magazines are willing to pay this kind of money.

“Already advertisers are vying for space in the special issues to mark the nuptials in June this year. The issues carrying photographs and interviews of the wedding are expected to deliver massive sales to add to OK!’s extraordinary success story,” the Express gushed (and yes, that was a news story!).

And it’s not only the A-list that can bring in the dollars for their weddings, pregnancies and such. Ivana Trump, 59, first wife of Donald, on April 12 is marrying her 35-year-old Italian  actor  Rossano Rubicondi at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion/palace in Palm Beach, Florida, and the word “posh” doesn’t begin to describe the festivities – for example the three-meter high (9 foot) cake being flown in from Germany, each layer in its own refrigerated box. They can’t bake 3 meter high cakes in West Palm? Good thing, therefore, that Getty Images struck a $250,000 deal for exclusive photo coverage. That should pay at least for the icing on the cake.

And yet at the other end of the spectrum comes a New York Times story that only a few US newspapers are availing themselves of seats on the planes used by the Presidential candidates. Depending on what the charter costs the candidate, journalist seats usually go for anywhere from $1,000 - $2,000 a day and it seems that except for a few prestigious newspapers that’s just a cost too far. Not even USAToday, the nation’s largest daily circulation newspaper, is covering on a regular basis, and the list of major metropolitan newspapers that are absent is scandalous while at the same time heartbreaking for it’s just further proof of how budget cuts and job losses are affecting the journalistic output of so many newspapers.

Back in the days when newspapers were really quite healthy financially but the United Press International news agency was basically broke, it decided as a cost savings measure not to send famed White House correspondent Helen Thomas on the Presidential plane when the President traveled because it cost too much.  Not having Helen on that plane  was about as journalistically sacrilegious as its got in Washington those days so two newspaper groups, regretfully memory has faded on which ones, stepped up to pay her costs. Doubtful that would happen today in similar circumstances.

But for magazines, the paparazzi have proven to one and all that the public thirsts for pictures of personalities, indeed we can’t seem to get enough of them so it is no wonder that the likes of People and Ok! fork out seven figure payments for first payments of Mom and Dad and babies – remember the Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt baby pictures that got them some $4 million that they used to fund one of their charities?

None of this has escaped the staid Associated Press that has hit the headlines twice recently when it comes to entertainment news. When the paparazzi a few weeks back really made Britney Spears life miserable, Frank Baker, the AP’s assistant bureau chief in Los Angeles wrote staff, “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.” The AP knows it can make good money globally on celebrity news, pictures and video. 

And now the other shoe has fallen as the AP has announced it is adding 21 additional staff spread between Los Angeles, New York and London to concentrate on more entertainment coverage because “it makes good business sense.”

The AP says this is not about gossip and the like but basically the AP will provide what sells, and it is, for instance, going to pay more attention to just about everything celebrities do these days, including showing up in court. It’s already signed a celebrity video deal with People.com. And to show how serious it is, the AP has established an entertainment group, with its own unified staff, management structure and P&L responsibilities.

Daniel Becker, newly appointed director of Entertainment Content, told staff in a memo that entertainment coverage will not be “about gossip, unnamed sources, and innuendo or about the ‘peephole’ journalism with AP photographers becoming paparazzi. It’s about recognizing an opportunity to use our journalistic talent  and unmatched network of  resources to produce high quality, multimedia coverage in an area of growing interest….In a realm in which gossip and innuendo abound particularly on the Web, our standards establish us as the trusted authoritative voice on entertainment for all our members and customers”

Not clear how all of that jives with Baker’s memo that virtually everything Britney Spears does from now on is a big deal. AP photographers won’t be chasing her car, or staking her out where they think she is going to visit next?

Whatever, there’s no doubt that the AP sees entertainment as its new cash cow. Magazines are doing well off it, newspaper web sites should eat up the AP video, and maybe some of those financial pages that have been savaged could be salvaged for more entertainment coverage? It seems to bring in the bucks (and the younger readers)!