No Dead Celebrity BOUNCE

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2003

Byline: SARAH GONSER

This year's celebrity death toll might seem like a fabulous newsstand windfall for entertainment-driven weeklies. After all, it was the glitzy lives of silver screen legends like Katherine Hepburn and Gregory Peck that provided the original grist for the gossip mills of celebrity media.

But it's not so simple. Editors at the major entertainment weeklies say the degree of cover play given to celebrity obituaries - especially to stars who haven't been seen onscreen lately - is often determined by balancing median reader age with the news cycle. In other words, sorry superstars, you and your Oscars and fantabulous careers have to take a back seat if there's a chance for an exclusive with a young hottie, no matter how unlikely his bid for eternal fame.

It's all about the age of the readers. So, there was no chance for nonagenarian Hepburn or centenarian Bob Hope to crack the cover of Us Weekly (unless maybe they were wearing Prada when they died). "Frankly, I don't know how many of our readers would even know who Kate Hepburn or Bob Hope was," says an Us Weekly spokesman. "Our median reader age is 32.3 and, well, they know a whole lot about what Britney is doing and what shoes she wore while doing it."

Editors must somehow divine their reader's memory span. For instance, Entertainment Weekly was the only weekly in the category to give Hepburn a cover. But Hope didn't even rate a mention. "Our readers [median age 32] were very young when Bob Hope was last on TV," says the magazine's VP of communications Sandy Drayton. "Whereas Katherine Hepburn's movies are so memorable and she'd won all those Oscars. Films tend to stay young longer."

Then there's that week's news. If, for instance, there's a kinky twist in the Ben and J.Lo romance, then the value of the dead celeb must be weighed against the potentially larger newsstand draw of live romance. Another issue is timing. Unless the celeb dies on closing night, they may be too cold (newswise) when the weekly hits the stands. "I have to put myself in the place of my reader and see if, in ten days when TV Guide hits newsstands, there is anything we can offer that hasn't been rehashed a hundred times by newspapers and television," says TV Guide editor in chief Mike Lafavore.

People magazine remains one of the few believers in celebrity obits. With a median reader age of 40.9, managing editor Martha Nelson says her readers expect commemoration from the 3.6-million circulation weekly. But even at People, the dearly departed have to compete with the week's news. Hepburn's death, sadly, coincided with the release of "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde." The film won't put Reese Witherspoon in competition to break Kate's Oscar record, but it garnered her the cover of People; Kate received a small inset photo on the cover. She did, however, score a 96-page commemorative "bookazine" which is selling on newsstands for $10.99.

Bob Hope, on the other hand, got the cover but no tribute issue because, according to Nelson, there just wasn't enough quality archival material. Gregory Peck got just a cover inset. "The films that he was remembered for were at this point so distant that he just didn't have the same kind of resonance that Hepburn and Hope had," says Nelson. Nor did Peck rate a tribute issue. Sorry, Atticus.