People (magazine)

For the Australian magazine, see People (Australian magazine).

People

Editor	Larry Hackett
Categories	Celebrity, human interest, news
Total circulation (2012)	3,563,035
First issue	March 4, 1974
Company	Time Inc. (Time Warner)
Country	United States
Language	English
Website	www.people.com
ISSN	0093-7673

File:Beyonce's People Magazine Cover.jpg

A special issue from People.

People (originally called People Weekly) is a weekly American magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories, published by Time Inc. With a readership of 46.6 million adults, People has the largest audience of any American magazine. People had $997 million in advertising revenue in 2011, the highest advertising revenue of any American magazine. In 2006, it had a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion. It was named "Magazine of the Year" by Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation and advertising. 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. 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".

People's website, People.com, focuses exclusively on celebrity news. 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.

People is perhaps best known for its yearly special issues naming "World's Most Beautiful People", "Best & Worst Dressed", and "Sexiest Man Alive".

The magazine's headquarters are in New York, and it maintains editorial bureaus in Los Angeles and in London. Due to economic reasons it closed bureaus in Austin, Miami, and Chicago in 2006.

History

The concept for People has been attributed to Andrew Heiskell, Time, Inc.’s chief executive officer at the time and the former publisher of the weekly Life magazine. The founding managing editor of People was Richard B. (Dick) Stolley, a former assistant managing editor at Life and the journalist who acquired the Zapruder tapes of the John F. Kennedy assassination for Time, Inc. in 1963. People's first publisher was Richard J. (Dick) Durrell, another Time, Inc. veteran.

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." Stolley’s almost religious determination to keep the magazine people-focused contributed significantly to its rapid early success. It is said that although Time, Inc. pumped an estimated $40 million into the venture, the magazine broke even 18 months after its debut in March 1974. Initially, the magazine was sold primarily on newsstands and in supermarkets. To get the magazine out each week, founding staff members regularly slept on the floor of their offices two or three nights each week and severely limited all non-essential outside engagements. The premiere March 4, 1974 edition featured 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. The magazine was, apart from its cover, printed in black-and-white. The initial cover price was 35 cents.

The core of the small founding editorial team included other editors, writers, photographers and photo editors from Life, which had ceased publication just 13 months earlier. This group included managing editor Stolley, senior editors Hal Wingo (father of ESPN anchor Trey Wingo), Sam Angeloff (the founding managing editor of Us magazine), and Robert Emmett Ginna (later a producer of films); writers James Watters (a theater reviewer) and Ronald B. Scott (later a biographer of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney); former Time senior editor Richard Burgheim (later the founder of Time's ill-fated cable television magazine View); Chief of Photography, a Life photographer, John Loengard, to be succeeded by John Dominus, a noteworthy Life staff photographer; and design artist Bernard Waber, author and illustrator of the Lyle The Crocodile book series for children. Many of the noteworthy Life photographers contributed to the magazine as well, including legends Alfred Eisenstaedt and Gjon Mili and rising stars Co Rentmeester, David Burnett and Bill Eppridge. Other members of the first editorial staff included editors and writers: Ross Drake, Ralph Novak, Bina Bernard, James Jerome, Sally Moore, Mary Vespa, Lee Wohlfert, Joy Wansley, Curt Davis, and Jed Horne, later an editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

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. Though the original idea was that Spanish-language translations of articles from the English magazine would comprise half the content, People en Español over time came to have entirely original content.

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.

On July 26, 2013, Outlook Group announced that it was closing down the Indian edition of People.

Teen People

Teen People

File:Nickteenpeople.jpg Teen People April 2006
Managing Editor	Niraj Biswal Barbara O'Dair
Categories	Celebrity
Frequency	Monthly
First issue	1998
Final issue	September 2006
Company	Time Inc. (Time Warner)
Country	United States
Language	English

In 1998, the magazine introduced a version targeted at teens called Teen People. However, on July 27, 2006, the company announced it would shut down publication of Teen People immediately. The last issue to be released was scheduled for September 2006. Subscribers to this magazine received Entertainment Weekly for the rest of their issues in exchange. There were numerous reasons cited for the publication shutdown, including a downfall in ad pages, competition from both other teen-oriented magazines and the internet along with a decrease in circulation numbers. Teenpeople.com was merged into People.com in April 2007. People.com will "carry teen-focused stories that are branded as TeenPeople.com", Mark Golin the editor of People.com explained, with the decision to merge the brands, "We've got traffic on TeenPeople, People is a larger site, why not combine and have the teen traffic going to one place?"

Competition for celebrity photos

In a July 2006 Variety article, Janice Min, Us Weekly editor-in-chief, blamed People for the increase in cost to publishers of celebrity photos:

They are among the largest spenders of celebrity photos in the industry....One of the first things they ever did, that led to the jacking up of photo prices, was to pay $75,000 to buy pictures of Jennifer Lopez reading Us magazine, so Us Weekly couldn't buy them.

That was the watershed moment that kicked off high photo prices in my mind. I had never seen anything like it. But they saw a competitor come along, and responded. It was a business move, and probably a smart one.

People reportedly paid $4.1 million for newborn photos of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, the child of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. The photos set a single-day traffic record for their website, attracting 26.5 million page views.

Sexiest Man Alive

See also: Sexiest Woman Alive

The annual feature the "Sexiest Man Alive" is billed as a benchmark of male attractiveness and typically includes only famous people and celebrities. It is determined in a similar procedure to Time's Person of the Year. The origin of the title was a discussion on a planned story on Mel Gibson. A female editor exclaimed, "Oh my God, he is the sexiest man alive!" And someone else said, "You should use that as a cover line."

For the first decade or so, the feature appeared at uneven intervals. Originally awarded in the wintertime, it shifted around the calendar, resulting in gaps as short as seven months and as long as a year and a half (with no selection at all during 1994). Since 1997, the dates have settled between mid-November and early December.

Dates of magazine issues, winners, ages of winners at the time of selection, and pertinent comments are listed below.

As of 2013, John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Patrick Swayze are the only winners to have died since winning. John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Adam Levine are the only non-actors to have won the award.

Year	Choice	Age	Notes
February 4, 1985	Mel Gibson	29	First man chosen and then an Australian citizen.
January 27, 1986	Mark Harmon	34
March 30, 1987	Harry Hamlin	35
September 12, 1988	John F. Kennedy, Jr.	27	Longest gap between selections: 18 months. First non-actor to win. First member to have since died (1999). Youngest winner.
December 16, 1989	Sean Connery	59	Oldest person to win the title. First winner to have portrayed James Bond. First Scottish winner.
July 23, 1990	Tom Cruise	28
July 22, 1991	Patrick Swayze	38	Second member to have since died (2009).
March 16, 1992	Nick Nolte	51
October 19, 1993	Richard Gere Cindy Crawford	44   27	People took a one-year hiatus from Sexiest Man and instead awarded Sexiest Couple.
January 30, 1995	Brad Pitt	31	First of two awards.
July 29, 1996	Denzel Washington	41	First African American winner.
November 17, 1997	George Clooney	36	First of two awards.
November 16, 1998	Harrison Ford	56
November 15, 1999	Richard Gere	50	First two-time winner.
November 13, 2000	Brad Pitt	36	First two-time solo winner.
November 26, 2001	Pierce Brosnan	48	Second winner to have portrayed James Bond. First Irish winner.
December 2, 2002	Ben Affleck	30
December 1, 2003	Johnny Depp	40	First of two awards.
November 29, 2004	Jude Law	31	First English winner
November 28, 2005	Matthew McConaughey	36
November 27, 2006	George Clooney	45	Second win.
November 26, 2007	Matt Damon	37
November 25, 2008	Hugh Jackman	40	Second Australian winner.
November 18, 2009	Johnny Depp	46	Second win.
November 17, 2010	Ryan Reynolds	34	First Canadian winner.
November 16, 2011	Bradley Cooper	36
November 14, 2012	Channing Tatum	32
November 19, 2013	Joe Mama	34	Second non-actor to win

Most Intriguing People of the Year

At the end of each year People magazine famously selects 25 news-making individuals or couples who have received a lot of media attention over the past 12 months and showcases them in a special year-end issue, the '25 Most Intriguing People of the Year'. This series of full page features and half page featurettes includes world leaders and political activists, famous actors and entertainers, elite athletes, prominent business people, accomplished scientists and occasionally members of the public whose stories have made an unusual impact in news or tabloid media.

For example, the news-makers People named as the "Most Intriguing People of 2010" were:

1. Sandra Bullock
2. President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama
3. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
4. Michael Douglas
5. Elizabeth Smart
6. Prince William and Catherine Middleton
7. Elin Nordegren
8. Natalie Portman
9. Nicki Minaj
10. Sarah Palin
11. LeBron James
12. Bret Michaels
13. Julian Assange
14. The Chilean Miners
15. Ricky Martin
16. Kim Kardashian
17. Mark Zuckerberg
18. Heidi Montag
19. Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor Swift
20. Ryan Reynolds
21. Will Smith's kids (Jaden and Willow)
22. Christina Aguilera
23. Ali Fedotowsky and Roberto Martinez
24. James Franco
25. Conan O'Brien

People Magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People

People Magazine's 100 Most Beautiful People is a list compiled and published by People of 100 people judged to be the most beautiful individuals in the world. It is published annually. Until 2006, it was the People Magazine 50 Most Beautiful People.

In 1990, Michelle Pfeiffer appeared on the cover of People's first ever "50 Most Beautiful People In The World" issue. She again was on the cover of the annual issue in 1999, having made the "Most Beautiful" list a record six times during the decade. Pfeiffer is also the first celebrity to have made the cover of the annual issue two times, and the only one to have been on the cover twice during the 1990s.

Number Ones of Most Beautiful People

Nr.	Year	Name
2	1991	Julia Roberts
3	1992	Jodie Foster
4	1993	Cindy Crawford
5	1994	Meg Ryan
6	1995	Courteney Cox
7	1996	Mel Gibson
8	1997	Tom Cruise
9	1998	Leonardo DiCaprio
10	1999	Michelle Pfeiffer
11	2000	Julia Roberts
12	2001	Catherine Zeta-Jones
13	2002	Nicole Kidman
14	2003	Halle Berry
15	2004	Jennifer Aniston
16	2005	Julia Roberts
17	2006	Angelina Jolie
18	2007	Drew Barrymore
19	2008	Kate Hudson
20	2009	Christina Applegate
21	2010	Julia Roberts
22	2011	Jennifer Lopez
23	2012	Beyoncé Knowles
24	2013	Gwyneth Paltrow

Notes

^ a: The ratio, according to Variety, is 53% to 47%.

External links

• Official website