Celeb Weeklies Still Sell

The public's appetite for salacious celebrity gossip appears to be alive and well. And the cheaper the newstand price, the better. Elle Girl's demise has been blamed on the competition from the celeb rags. The idea that publisher Hachette Filipacchi is now obsessed with new media is ironic; in my Premiere days they ran away from it as fast as they could, to the detriment of effectively marketing their magazines. Time Warner's early investment in new media was smart and helped to push their various brands in cyberspace. Adds Mediabistro's Revolving Door Newsletter:

"April is the cruelest month, wrote T. S. Eliot in "The Waste Land," and he never even had to watch his favorite poetry magazines go under. It's hard to imagine a crueler fate for ElleGirl, which was shut down this week by parent Hachette Filipacchi despite robust gains in circulation and advertising pages. It's just that, in the age of MySpace, teenage girls are supposedly too busy texting to look up and read magazines. The brand will live on and be built out online (hello ElleGirl ringtones!), but editor Christina Kelly and most of her staff is being kicked to the curb. On the one hand, it's a damn shame; on the other, they should have known that you take your life in your hands when you go to work at Hachette. Since Jack Kliger took over as CEO nearly seven years ago, he has closed, in no particular order, George, Mirabella, Travel Holiday, and now ElleGirl, which was the first magazine the company had actual ly launched on his watch.."