Us Weekly editor quits after years nurturing, feeding public’s addiction to celebrity news

Editor spent 6 years nurturing our celeb addiction

NEW YORK — In six years as editor in chief of Us Weekly, Janice Min often found herself zealously watching young women in airport lounges. She wanted to be sure they were reading her magazine cover to cover.

“I was amazed at how often they were reading every last word,” Min says with a satisfied smile. The celebrity editor, who announced this week she was stepping down to pursue other, unspecified opportunities, presided over a two-thirds increase in circulation during her tenure, in part by recognizing that young, affluent women like herself wanted to read edgier, newsier celebrity journalism — lots of it.

For that, Min was handsomely rewarded — close to $2 million, according to some accounts (She won’t comment). But this is a tough time for print media, and though Us Weekly is doing well, there have been reports that Min decided to leave partly because her boss, Jann Wenner, was unwilling to keep paying her at the same level.

True or not, Min is probably one of the last magazine editors to be paid so well, says industry analyst Samir Husni.

“Those bloated days are gone in our business,” says Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. “We were riding such a wave of success that we blinded ourselves somewhat.” Yet he credits Min and her predecessor, Bonnie Fuller, for putting celebrity journalism on the map. “Now it’s a genre, part of the journalism landscape.”

Min, 39, insists she simply needed a career change. “I just want to do something new,” she said this week in her modest midtown Manhattan office, dressed down in long white shorts. “I feel strongly that there were skills I applied to Us Weekly that would be applicable to other media.” She said she had no job in hand and no plans — other than vacation.

Wenner, whose Wenner Media also publishes Rolling Stone, denies reports that money had anything to do with the departure. Rather, he says, “there’s a right time for everything, and Janice was smart and I was smart.”

A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, Min took over the magazine at merely 33, having served for just over a year as a deputy to Fuller, who left for American Media and its Star magazine. Though Fuller is credited by many, including Husni, with the changes that led to the Us Weekly’s success, there are differences, says Wenner.

“Bonnie was pretty negative about celebrities,” says the publisher. “Janice isn’t. You’d be hard-pressed to find a mean picture in our magazine. Pictures of celebrities carrying shopping bags aren’t mean.”

Still, Us Weekly thrives on features like “Worst Wardrobe Malfunctions,” a photo gallery now on its Web site that includes such embarrassing moments as young “Harry Potter” star Emma Watson with her dress falling open up to the waist. A focus on such things is a marked change from the celebrity journalism of the ’80s and ’90s, Min notes.

“There was a very remote relationship then between the public and celebrities,” she says. “They were meant to be up on a pedestal. They were primarily movie stars, and their publicists totally controlled the news about them.”

But then the whole relationship shifted, Min says, along with the very definition of a celebrity, a process that coincided with the rise of reality TV. Indeed, one of her points of pride is having recognized the potential for news about reality stars. She put “Bachelorette” couple Trista and Ryan (you know, the ones who are still together) on the cover, and it sold big.

More recently, knowing she couldn’t depend forever on stars like Brad and Angelina or Britney, Lindsay and Paris, Min listened to her staff of 20-something women and realized that an obscure, then low-rated show called “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ on the TLC network was catching women’s fancy.

“It was the talkability of the story — what do you go home and talk to your friends about?” says Min. “People were fascinated with this couple, and how Kate treated her husband.”

Now, that show is a tabloid staple and a big hit: The episode where the couple announced their split drew a whopping 10.6 million viewers. “It’s definitely a two-way street,” says Min.

But she had also realized that the viability of a cover story had nothing to do with how high a show’s ratings were. “We can sell a ‘Jon & Kate’ cover many times over an ‘American Idol’ cover,” she says emphatically. To wit, this week’s cover: “Kate’s Sad Kids.”

Not to say that Min actually watches reality TV. She depends on her staff for that. Her favorite TV show? “Mad Men,” AMC’s moody, stylish exploration of the 1960s advertising world in Manhattan.

Hardly Us Weekly fodder. “‘Mad Men’ will never make the cover,” Min quips.

Despite the difficult climate for print media, Us Weekly has held up well. It says its ad pages were down 10 percent for the first half of 2009, compared with a 28 percent decline for the rest of the magazine industry.

As the second-largest celebrity and entertainment weekly behind People, Us Weekly had average circulation of 1.9 million in the last six months of 2008, the latest figures available from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. And according to comScore, its Web traffic also is up significantly from a year ago.

Another change in the Min era, though not one she can really take credit for: a focus on political celebrities, most notably Barack Obama. The new president or his family has been featured on at least four covers. (Soon-to-be former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska had one.)

“Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton… they’re part of our popular culture in a way that George Bush and John Kerry never were,” says Min. “Obama just has that celebrity factor.”

But Min doesn’t fear for the viability of pure celebrity journalism, of our essential need to read about Britney’s latest parenting gaffe, Lindsay’s latest brush with the law, Paris’ latest driving violation, or Brad and Angelina’s latest pregnancy.

“If there’s one thing you can count on, escapism and frivolity will always come back,” says Min. “It’s difficult to imagine that the women who come to us for escapism will suddenly start reading ‘Foreign Affairs’ or watching ‘Nova’ instead. Everyone needs an escape.”