Us staffers: ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’

cover of this week’s Star magazine is giving agita to staffers at Us Weekly, who are slated to join their new sister titles including Star at American Media’s headquarters downtown on Monday.

That’s because Star’s cover, which proclaims “It’s Over” between Sofia Vergara and hubby Joe Manganiello, has been branded as “fake news” by Vergara.

“Anxiety levels are rising here ahead of the move downtown Monday,” said one Us Weekly source.

On the plus side, AMI Chief Executive David Pecker spent extra money to delay deadlines for Us for a day to get photos from the Met Gala on Monday into the issue that hit this week.

But Us Weekly’s 80 surviving staffers — from the original 120 — are worried more about editorial integrity at their new home. The editor of Star, James Heidenry, is also the new editor of Us Weekly.

One insider said they are already getting calls from Hollywood publicists asking them, “Is this the way it is going to be now?”

The Star cover shows a picture of Vergara dancing with another man, purportedly without her wedding ring, at an awards ceremony in Rome.

On social media, Vergara claims that the ring was on her hand but was Photoshopped out of the picture by Star editors. The “other man” is the producer of her next movie, she said.

“The editor of this magazine is an idiot,” she said on Facebook, adding that other social media shots that night showed her wearing the ring.

A spokesman for Star said it has more recent photos of Vergara and she is not wearing a ring.

“Although Ms. Vergara has claimed that Star removed her wedding ring from a photograph on its cover that was taken during that award night in Rome,” the photograph in which Ms. Vergara is pictured without her wedding ring was taken in Los Angeles on April 15, af- ter she returned from Rome, and appears on page 34 of the magazine,” Star said in a statement.

The $100 million deal announced in mid-March was delayed until late April, while the feds made sure it passed muster under antitrust laws.

Google and Facebook command more than 75 percent of all digital ad spending in today’s market, but a new report says a backlash against objectional content on their sites could cause advertisers to start pulling up to $2.9 billion in ads.

“Google and Facebook will lose the most, most quickly,” said a bombshell report from Forrester Research released this week called “The End Of Advertising As We Know It.”

Quality media will benefit as marketers move to build deeper relationships with brands, the report predicts.

“CMOs [chief marketing officers] will shift billions from bad ads to better relationships,” according to the report.

“We don’t expect a complete vote of no confidence in all of advertising or even in digital advertising on which you will still spend billions,” said the research written by James McQuivey and Keith Johnston.

“But if we can persuade the top ten advertisers to shift just 10 percent of their ad budgets to branded relationships, it will cut $2.9 billion from the current ad business — a decline of 1.6 percent for this year in a display market that’s growing faster than overall.”

“We won’t lie to you,” the Forrester report continues. “This will be painful for many advertising services companies and technology platforms that rely on misspentnt ad dollars.”

It also says that in the digital world “display advertising never worked like we pretended. CMOs know this but nobody wants to talk about it even though advertisers wasted $7.4 billion on poor-quality ad placement in 2016 alone,” the report found.

“Brand marketers have to stop being seduced by the crack cocaine of low cost CPMs” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group. “The biggest culprits are the brand marketers themselves, who are willing to turn a blind eye to the content.” He said Procter & Gamble, JPMorgan Chase and Johnson & Johnson are leading a push toward quality. Time Inc., only a week after calling off merger talks, unveiled its latest digital aspirations, including the launch of a Sports Illustrated streaming video-on-demand service, adding a second daily halfhour show to People Now and hatching a deal with Twitter to live ststream a weekly show with EEssence. The company said it will produce 150 video series in 2017. CEO Rich Battista said the company planned 1,500 hours of live video programming this year and also will have 40 hours of programming on conventional television, including four hours with ABC in August marking the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. So far, no advertisers have been lined up for the new Sports Illustrated network. “We just announced it today,” he said. “We’re having lots of discussions with lots of players.”