Royally bad timing
People’s ‘stale’ special
PEOPLE Royals — the gossip mag’s new quarterly publication focused on “all things royal” — could not have debuted at a worse time. Last Friday, just two days before the world was abuzz over Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey detailing their tortured relationship with the British monarchy, the high-priced quarterly hit the stands with a cover focused on a smiling “Kate the Great.”
In a February sneak peek, the Meredith publication said of its inaugural-issue cover story: “At the 10-year mark in her royal career, Princess Kate has firmly established her voice. If the current queen, 94, has embodied the very English stiff upper lip throughout her long reign, Kate, 39, the millennial queen-in-the-making, has chosen a modern path: Feelings are to be validated, mental health is to be prioritized and laughter is to be encouraged.
That would seem to stand in stark contrast to the picture painted by Meghan and Harry in a two-hour special that aired on CBS Sunday and in Britain on Monday.
Instead of embracing their royal life, the couple dangled claims of racism and said that the palace, which Markle derisively called “the firm,” offered no help at all as she wrestled with mental-health problems that left her entertaining suicidal thoughts.
The cover of People Royals ($12.99 on newsstands), boasts a secondary story on Harry and Meghan, “What Their New Life is Really Like,” but doesn’t have the exclusive first-person interview that earned Oprah’s Harpo Productions a reported $7 million from CBS.
People’s regular weekly edition had up-to-the-minute breaking news on how Buckingham Palace went into crisis mode after the interview appeared. But high-priced quarterly “bookazines” are planned long in advance, usually with evergreen material often written by freelancers that can sit on newsstands for months without appearing dated.
Meanwhile Meredith archrival Hearst is set to rake it in with its relaunched Oprah magazine, a joint venture between Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and Hearst.
O the Oprah Magazine published its last regular monthly print edition in December, and Media Ink can exclusively reveal that the new version, which will be printed quarterly, will be renamed O Quarterly.
Its first issue hits March 30 with a $12.99 cover price. And unlike the previous version, it won’t rely on ads.
On Tuesday, oprahmag.com, which usually covers wellness topics, had four excerpts from the explosive interview with the disgruntled royal couple splashed across its homepage as part of it free offerings as it seeks to encourage readers to start paying for premium content.
Meredith isn’t the only publisher in an awkward spot following the Oprah interview. Ben Harris, former head of the defunct Harris Publications, which shut down abruptly in April 2016, is back in business with a new company called Centennial Media. And his latest bookazine, titled Kate, also focuses on the tenth anniversary of Kate Middleton as a royal.
Barnes & Noble on Tuesday was featuring it prominently on in its Union Square store, but sales figures are not yet available.
Meanwhile, People Royals had yet to arrive in Barnes & Noble flagship store as scheduled last Friday and was not yet on sale at a nearby Walgreens.
Sources said People Royals was on sale at Barnes & Noble stores in other locations, however, including on the Upper East Side and at the Books-A-Million chain. About 400,000 copies of the debut issue were heading to newsstands nationally with an on-sale date of last Friday.
Just three weeks after finalizing a deal to buy HuffPost, Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed is taking a buzzsaw to the left-leaning news and culture site.
BuzzFeed on Tuesday said it was making a series of cuts in HuffPost that will result in 47 US jobs lost, including executive editor Hillary Frey and executive editor international Louise Roug. The Canadian version of the Web site will also be shuttered. Peretti told staffers the decision was made to “fasttrack the path to profitability” for the money-losing site, HuffPost reported. Losses totaled around $20 million in 2020, he said. “Though BuzzFeed is a profitable company, we don’t have the resources to support another two years of losses,” Peretti reportedly said. BuzzFeed agreed in November to buy HuffPost, which Peretti founded in 2005 with Arianna Huffington, Andrew Breitbart and venture capitalist Kenneth Lerer. It was launched as a left-leaning counterweight to the Drudge Report. But the site has lost money for most of its existence — leading to last year’s sale by Verizon, which acquired it as part of its $4.4 billion acquisition of parent company AOL in 2015.