The local publishing industry continues to feed South Africans’ insatiable appetite for ”exclusive” new details of what Paris, Angelina and Britney are up to. Afrikaners now have a new celebrity mag in Mense, while an up-market gossip sheet, In Style, will soon hit the news-stands.
Since the end of May, Mense, the younger sister of gossip stalwart People, has been treating the ever-growing Afrikaans-speaking market to such indispensable snippets as why Geri Halliwell should take care not to knock someone over with her post-maternity boobs, how Janet Jackson lost so much weight, and why rake-thin Kate Moss should pop into her nearest McDonald’s.
Aimed principally at women aged 16 to 35, it already sells between 25 000 and 30 000 copies a week and circulation is growing, says assistant editor Chantell Marais. She says 85% of Mense’s content is a direct translation from People, but that the latter’s 116 000 weekly sale remains undented.
United States-based In Style will be the celeb mag you don’t have to take home in a brown paper wrapper. It will form part of Media24’s expanding magazine stable, which stands at 53 publications but is growing faster than Britney’s derrière, with new titles appearing almost weekly.
Heat, a weekly from the same stable, has been one of its major successes. While the Mail & Guardian took 20 years to breach the 40 000 sales mark, Heat vaulted from first-edition 46 000 to its current 80 000 sales a week in the two years since its launch in March 2004. It also costs more than the M&G — R15,95, substantially more than any of its competitors.
Said the magazine’s bright and evidently ambitious editor, Melinda Shaw: ”It was risky to launch at such a high cover price, but the high production values and the exclusivity of the brand merited the cover price as much then as it does today.
”The magazine’s growth pattern puts it in the top percentage of fastest-growing magazines in the country. Heat’s launch in fact stimulated the market, as none of our nearest competitors have experienced a related drop in circulation, despite increasing their cover prices substantially. People even increased its frequency to weekly.”
Hollywood has always been a source of popular fascination, but the unprecedented appetite for celebrity news is a spin-off of globalisation, believes Lizette Rabe, head of Stellenbosch University’s journalism department. Now every man and woman across the globe feels him or herself to be on first-name terms with the rich and glitzy.
”This hunger for what celebrities are up to is a form of voyeurism, to find out what is happening behind the front doors of their living rooms,” Rabe said.
Explaining the proliferation of celeb titles, she added that there was an ”exploding” publishing trend towards the mining of ever-narrower niches. ”Previously, success was determined by circulation, but now it is based on advertising. The type of advertisers magazines attract comes from finding the right niche.”
Media24 is doing just this. It has launched, or is about to launch, four car and motorbike magazines catering for different income segments, from top to entry-level.
While she sees nothing fundamentally wrong with the escapism these ”low-kilojoule” publications provide, Rabe is concerned about dumbing-down. ”They fill you up, but don’t give you the proteins and vitamins you need. I hope readers find their gravitas elsewhere.”
Explaining the ”need” for celeb mags, Heat’s Shaw also uses a diet metaphor: ”We buy them for the same reason we buy popcorn in the movies — not to provide a full nutritional meal covering all the basic food groups, but to give us something to chow in the dark without bothering the guy in the next seat.
”Heat gives its readers something to look forward to every week, something to fill a delightful hour before carrying on with the rest of their lives.”
Is there a danger that such reading distances people from the hard realities that should concern them, like war and poverty? ”Oh, puleeze, give people more credit!” retorts Shaw. ”Just because you eat popcorn in the movies doesn’t mean you distance yourself from vegetables and protein at the dinner table, does it?
”I don’t think there are many South Africans in 2006 who don’t get more than their fair share of ‘reality’ on a daily basis, whether they like it or not, and to deny them some entertainment and escapism is plain short-sighted.”
Mense’s Marais agrees: ”I love this country, but there are many things that get people down. That’s why we like to give them a smile … you know, like laughing at the stupid dress Paris is wearing and so on.”
She insists her readers can also draw something substantial from the magazine. ”Skinny celebs aren’t great — don’t starve, have a balanced diet,” she says. ”And reading about these celebs tells you their lives aren’t always that wonderful. Being the best you can be is better than being Paris Hilton.”
Why has the gossip-sheet market expanded so enormously? ”The stars lead enviable lives,” says Shaw, ”with access to such glamour on every level — what they wear, how they look, who they hang out with, how much they get paid for their jobs and which red-hot events they get to attend, in designer gear that is given to them free … all of which makes them eminently watchable.
”There’s also such a proliferation of info available on the A-list that anyone can feel they know them personally. You can easily know more intimate, banal details about the life of a Hollywood star than you would of your cousin Betty in Cape Town.”
And familiarity breeds curiosity. The better you know someone, the more interesting even the most banal details of their life become, Marais argues. ”If your sister dyes her blonde hair black, or your cousin Betty finally dumps her cheating husband, you’re interested; you’d discuss it at a family gathering. The facts may be banal, but the people are so familiar that you care about even the trivial details of their lives.
”With TV and Internet, and movies on DVD, not to mention print media, we get so much info regularly about the inhabitants of Tinseltown that they become interesting on the same level.”
Shaw strongly disagrees with the suggestion that the fame game is shallow fare for a self-respecting journalist. ”Do gravediggers get sick of digging graves because they’re so deep? The shallowness is your perception, not mine; and frankly, I get so bored with people who feel they need to define their own intelligence by the entertainment they choose. Whether you like Louis L’Amour’s pulp fiction or Cabrera Infante, go for it, dude. The point is that you as a consumer turn to those books for entertainment, and it’s none of my business what you find entertaining.
”Heat is pure entertainment, and that is a delightful thing in a world of crime and rising interest rates and corrupt politicians.”
So what’s the next big story? Marais says the first pictures of Tom Cruise’s baby, born 12 weeks ago but so far not shown to the world. Now you know. Exclusively.