Everyone likes a salacious story about a celebrity’s life. But whereas the tabloid rags that line newsstands and the checkout lines of grocery stores have experienced declines in their readership numbers, the websites that cover entertainment news have picked up the slack. This has occurred for many reasons, most of them having to do with the rise in use of the Internet as a viable option to obtain this entertainment news.
For one, today’s culture wants entertainment news right now and right after it happens. Waiting a week to get a hard copy of this entertainment news is no longer feasible for a generation of Americans who can just as simply look up this news on the Internet. Some magazines, therefore, have made their online components updated every hour on the hour, while others have largely left their readership to wait around. Those that have adapted to today’s right now culture and that post entertainment news today and every day are faring much better.
For another, the costs for subscribing to these publications are rising, yet the quality is the same for todays entertainment news. This leaves many subscribers disenchanted about what they used to enjoy about reading these magazines. Their subscription costs are going up, yet they still are waiting around for their magazines to show up in their mailboxes each week. And when they do get to read them, they often find that they already know much of the news that appears there because it has shown up online somewhere.
Loyal subscribers to these magazines, therefore, either are getting their entertainment news elsewhere or are keeping their subscriptions with the places that also have excellent online news sites for daily doses of news surrounding the entertainment industry. People who are combining these efforts usually are happy because they get the hard hitting and short form of news from the web and then the longer versions of those stories in the print publications that show up in their mailboxes weekly. This then makes sense why the magazines that publish this news in print and online and that are proactive about being ahead of the curve here are doing better than the magazines that are crossing their fingers that people will somehow return to an era when print was alive and well and when they were perfectly fine to wait for entertainment news on a weekly rather than hourly basis.