How the Cult of Adolescent Celebrity Ate the Magazine Biz

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2004 by Simon Dumenco

In other words, Popstar created the template for an upscale, modern magazine for obsessive adolescents pining over teen and 20-something stars; Us Weekly, In Touch and Star followed suit (dispensing with the emotional reserve, erudition and balance of previous generations of adult celebrity-oriented magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair). Now those titles have basically become Popstar, but with an older demo. Meanwhile, the rest of the market is headed in the same direction - you'd be increasingly hard-pressed to find celebrities as ancient as, say, Madonna, on any magazine cover anymore. (Who could have predicted even a few years ago that the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Johnny Knoxville would end up as GQ coverboys?)

You may ask yourself How do I work this?

I had lunch with Matthew Rettenmund recently - he's still presiding over Popstar's bare-bones staff, working out of a time-warped Times Square building that mostly houses crusty old Broadway theatrical agents in tiny offices fronted by quaint frosted-glass doors with hand-lettered company names. Rettenmund is lately full of grand ambitions for expansion. His magazine has a new owner/publisher, Robert Earl (the founder and CEO of Planet Hollywood) and a new distribution deal in place with newsstand giant Curtis, which has pushed the draw of the August issue up to a historic high of 475,000. (Given Popstar's new $2.99-to-$3.99 cover price range - cut from $4.99 - Curtis is projecting better than 50 percent sell-through.)

Rettenmund is funny, smart, likable - a nice guy. More to the point, his magazine is nice. It's so nice, in fact, that there's something a little heartbreaking about reading it, because as right now as it is - as much as it looks like Us Weekly or Star or In Touch - it's also a throwback to that moment not so long ago when the word celebrity didn't automatically connote extreme dysfunction or pathologically conspicuous consumption. If Popstar is one of the missing links in the recent evolution of magazines, it's also missing one key bit of DNA itself: the bitterness gene.

Unlike its adult clones, Popstar's not all shot through with snarky bite. Its August issue had a coverline that read "STAR STUFF U NEED TO KNOW!" - but it was harmless stuff, like about first kisses and the recent charity football game in which the cast of One Tree Hill played. Read Popstar side by side with its adult clones and it's beyond depressing. The latter cover largely the same cast of characters, but in a way that I often find to be gratuitously intrusive and nasty, like running stalkerazzi photos of celebrities with bad skin, or printing idiotic hearsay about celebrity misbehavior and infidelity. Sometimes it seems like the cast of Mean Girls is in charge.

You may ask yourself Where does that highway go to? You may ask yourself Am I right, am I wrong? You may say to yourself My God! What have I done?

American pop culture has always had a love/hate relationship with youth, but now that adult magazines refuse to act their age, editors are increasingly acting out by abusing the youthful celebrities they've come to rely on to sell copies.