People (originally called People Weekly) is a weekly American magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories, published by Time Inc.[1] As of 2006, it has a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion.[2] It was named "Magazine of the Year" by Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation and advertising.[3] People ranked #6 on Advertising Age's annual "A-list" and #3 on Adweek's "Brand Blazers" list in October 2006.
The magazine runs a roughly 50/50 mix of celebrity and human-interest articles.[1] People's editors claim to refrain from printing pure celebrity gossip, enough so to lead celebrity publicists to propose exclusives to the magazine, evidence of what one staffer calls a "publicist-friendly strategy."[2]
People's website, People.com, focuses exclusively on celebrity news.[1][3] In February 2007, the website drew 39.6 million page views "within a day" of the Golden Globes. However "the mother ship of Oscar coverage" broke a site record with 51.7 million page views on the day after the Oscars, beating the previous record set just a month before from the Golden Globes.[4]
People is perhaps best known for its yearly special issues naming "Most Beautiful People", "The Best Dressed", and "The Sexiest Man Alive".
The magazine maintains a single editorial bureau in Los Angeles. Due to economic reasons it has recently closed bureaus in New York City, Austin, Miami, Chicago, and London.[2][3]
On April 6th 2010, a Greek edition of People began publication.
History
People was co-founded by Dick Durrell and Matthew Maynard[5] as a spin-off from the "People" page in Time magazine. Its first managing editor, Richard Stolley, characterized the magazine as "getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be in it. Our focus is on people, not issues."[6]It debuted in 1974, with a March 4 issue featuring actress Mia Farrow, then starring in the movie The Great Gatsby, on the cover. That issue also featured stories on Gloria Vanderbilt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the wives of U.S. Vietnam veterans who were Missing In Action.[2] The magazine was, apart from its cover, printed in black-and-white.
In 1996 Time, Inc. launched a Spanish-language magazine entitled People en Español. The company has said that the new publication emerged after a 1995 issue of the original magazine was distributed with two distinct covers, one featuring the slain Tejano singer Selena and the other featuring the hit television series Friends; the Selena cover sold out while the other did not.[7] Though the original idea was that Spanish-language translations of articles from the English magazine would comprise half the content of People en Español over time came to have entirely original content.[8]
In 2002, People introduced People Stylewatch, a title focusing on celebrity style, fashion, and beauty- a newsstand extension of its Stylewatch column. Due to its success, the frequency of People Stylewatch was increased to 10 times per year in 2007.
In Australia, the localized version of People is titled Who because of a pre-existing lad's mag published under the title People.