After long being the industry's laughing stock, Us Weekly has apparently gained in both circulation and general respect over the last year or so.
After long being the industry's laughing stock, Us Weekly has apparently gained in both circulation and general respect over the last year or so. Seems logical to me, really; a magazine as insipid as Us Weekly would probably have nowhere to go but up. The question is, how did it do it? Well, in March of last year, the esteemed Bonnie Fuller was named editor-in-chief of Us Weekly. I'm not really smart enough to explain how an editor-in-chief can turn a magazine's fortunes around, but apparently she succeeded. In October, Advertising Age bestowed their prestigious Editor of the Year award to her, making her the only person ever to receive the award twice. Furthermore, Us Weekly made Ad Age's influential "A List" of magazines, which is the periodical equivalent of getting two thumbs up. So, after years of merely flipping through Us Weekly while in line at the supermarket, I sat down to see what all the fuss is about.
Let's start with the obvious (as if anything is subtle about this magazine) as a jumping-on point: the title. It's called Us, but I don't know who the hell any of these people are. To me, a magazine about us would have pictures and stories about my friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. Only I'd call it Joe's Peeps and suspect it wouldn't do very well. Us is about people I see on TV and in movies, none of whom have any contact with my life, although I do occasionally see Ed Begley, Jr. tooling around Studio City in his electric car. That's the only possible overlap between my life and Us, and in all the page-flipping I did, I didn't see Mr. Begley, Jr. in Us at all.
Nevertheless, it's still probably the best title for the magazine. We're already more familiar with celebrities than we are with our neighbors, and people who gravitate to this kind of fluff are already sold on its value as news and entertainment. Why not sell the whole shebang, reminding us along the way that famous people are human too? Beside, People was already taken, Famous People sounds clunky, Stars! sounds too much like Star and God forbid anyone confuse the two, Celebs! sounds too raggy, Starfucker Weekly would limit circulation and advertisement potential. I suppose it could have merged with one of its television cousins and be renamed Extra!, the Coffee Table Companion, but that would just diminish its unique voice.
Trouble is, they're not us. The people in Us Weekly spend more money on shoes than most of us make in a week. They meet and briefly date other celebrities while filming a movie somewhere. Apparently, they lose all their extra weight right away after giving birth. And, if the photos don't lie, none of them have pores.
If the magazine really represents us, then we are Gwyneth and Sandra and Eminem and Halle and Cameron and Rosie O. We're Michael & Catherine, Ben & J. Lo (ahem, J. Lo & Ben), Brad & Jennifer, Julia & the cameraman, whatever his non-famous name is. We're Angelina & Billy Bob but in separate rooms; same for Tom & Nicole and Britney & Justin. We're the cast of Will & Grace in bed, nude, a sheet covering our privates, because we're no longer the cast of Seinfeld doing a similar photo spread several years ago. That was, after all, several years ago. We're periodically Matthew Perry, but only when we're in a car accident or in rehab. We're Celine. We are Celine Dion. All of us. Ew.
This also means that we're not a lot of other people. We're evidently not Gene Hackman or Anthony Hopkins. We're not Dustin Hoffman or Clint Eastwood or Robert (Duvall, Redford, none of 'em), or Judi Dench or Meryl Streep or Ellen Burstyn. We're sure as hell not Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, nor are we Warren Beatty & Annette Bening, or even Sean Penn & Robin Wright Penn. We're not Maggie Smith, Chris Cooper, Susan Sarandon, Ben Kingsley, Dennis Franz, Kathy Bates, Christopher Plummer, Brian Dennehy, Tim Allen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, William H. Macy, Bob Balaban, to name just a dozen of the many, many other famous people we're not. We were Meg and Michelle and Holly, but we made the egregious error of turning 40. (Get pinched for shoplifting, then that's us; turn 40, g'bye.) Now we're Jessica and Brittany and Kate.
The pre-Fuller Us Weekly and the post-Fuller one do seem to have some differences. Older issues appear to have more pages, more text, and less clutter in general, including fewer photos. They also had more stories about old people. I mean really old, like Candace Bergen and Joan Lunden. They even had a small section that reviewed books. Since Ms. Fuller took over, she seems to have taken the "editor" part of her title to heart. There seem to be fewer pages and fewer words on the pages. In fact, the most text-heavy page appears to be the page with letters from the readers. (Kent Brownridge, a senior VP at parent company Wenner Media, was quoted as saying that Fuller's Ad Age award was "huge." I don't suppose that relates to Fuller's name on the masthead being larger than her predecessors', another change I noticed.)
And as if the material wasn't pedestrian enough before, the Fuller era has ushered in a tsunami of fashion, makeup, and diet & exercise stories about the stars. (I guess Dennis Franz will never appear in it now.) Week after week — except for the occasional double-issue, which spans two weeks without any extra pages — there appears story after story about how the rich & poreless get that fabulous look, those sculpted abs, the almost God-given fashion sense.
Ad Age put Us Weekly on its A-list because of its "excellence in circulation, advertising pages, and content." Content? What content? The magazine is shorter, for God's sake. And the content now contains stories about celebrity facial peels and photos such as Carrie-Anne Moss buying a holiday wreath at Target. But they're right about the circulation. In the first half of 2001, newsstand sales of Us Weekly grew 30.1 percent, and overall paid circulation is up 16 percent.
So, the content changes, sales go up. How did Bonnie Fuller do it? What is the secret? How did she know what readers wanted?
She asked them.
In her first issue as editor-in-chief, March 25, 2002, she has her own box. It has a picture of her with earnest eyes next to a letter that reads, in part, "One thing I want to be sure I do in my new job as editor-in-chief is to pack this magazine with the scoops and style news on the stars who fascinate Us, dazzle Us and obsess Us." Beneath that is a poll asking readers to chime in on what they want to see. The issues since then have had similar polls, presumably to help to continue this clever trend.
I don't know anyone who reads Us Weekly. I didn't before this story and I won't in the future. I didn't do a thorough survey of everyone in Joe's Peeps, but the few I did ask all said they didn't read it. My coworkers, people who have In Style and Shape on their desks, don't read it. One friend who watches the likes of Entertainment Tonight called Us Weekly, and I quote, "trash."
So, who reads it? Who are these extra subscribers in the last year? And who's been answering Bonnie Fuller's polls? Oh dear God. I don't know who else it could be. It can't be. It must be. It's ... it's ...
