Celebrity Magazines

Celebrity magazines are like candy dishes. They're shiny, colorful, and go down easy, like a handful of chocolates. Long on speculation and short on hard news, fanzines deliver to their eager readers a little glimpse of the lives of the rich and famous.

Fanzines: Dish vs. Dirt

There are different types of celebrity magazines, to be sure. Some build their reputation on the dirt, others on the dish. But they all strive to satisfy their reader's endless curiosity with what life is like "on the other side" of the camera.

People magazine helped create the new paradigm of what contemporary celebrity magazines are all about. Though tabloid-style celebrity magazines had been around for generations, People raised the standard of writing of fanzines, and looked beyond the hair and makeup to find out what motivated the lives of beloved stars. In its tracks soon followed US Weekly, In Touch Weekly, In Style, and a treasure trove of others.

Some celebrity magazines are star-friendly, others less so. Magazines like In Style, for instance, concentrate solely on the lifestyles of stars, not the gossip that swirls around them. US Weekly, on the other hand, pulls no punches and is happy to speculate what may be behind a star's recent weight loss or potential marriage problems. Regardless of tone, one thing certainly remains consistent: circulation of all celebrity magazines has gone up and up. And with American culture spawning celebrities at a record rate, there's more than enough material to keep celebrity magazines in business for generations to come.