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"Half-human half-fish found in Florida" proclaims the Page One headline over a picture of a fish with human legs.
Stories like that recent gem in the Weekly World News give Enquirer/Star Group Inc. executives barrels of laughs--and bundles of cash.
Enquirer/Star, the owner of such national treasures as National Enquirer, The Star, and Weekly World News, dominates a lucrative niche on the fringes of the newspaper industry by providing readers with weekly reportage on movie stars' private lives, cancer cures, diets, and visiting space aliens.
The "supermarket tabloids" operate in a strange journalistic netherworld blending fact, gossip and farce. Nothing--and that means nothing--is too outrageous, bizarre or incredible.
Most mainstream journalists would probably agree that the tabs thrive on scandal and sensationalism, appeal to baser instincts, and play fast and loose with the facts.
"We are in the field of personality journalism," says David Galpern, Enquirer/Star executive vice president and CFO.
In that genre, competitors include the tabloid The Globe and People magazine.
But Enquirer/Star executives are flattered by what they see as a trend of being imitated by the very same mainstream papers that ridicule the tabs. They point to front-page reporting, even in the nations most respected journals, of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and the breakup of Charles and Di--to say nothing of the dailies' increasingly prominent "people" columns.
"The differences between...personality journalism and the rest of journalism have narrowed dramatically over the last 10 years," Enquirer/Star vice chairman and COO Michael J. Boylan said. "When Zsa Zsa Gabor slaps a Beverly Hills cop, we now have to fight the networks and the newspapers to cover the story."
"We have a large and loyal reader base, and I think other publishers are starting to recognize the vitality and interest in personality journalism," Galpern said.
Geneologically linked to confessional and movie magazines and to sensational tabloid newspapers, the supermarket tabs thrive in a market of less-educated readers who seek escape, fantasy and entertainment, said Everette Dennis, executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York.
Their social cachet is such that some people are ashamed to be seen buying them, but the tabs enjoy "the best traffic pattern of any medium in the country" at the nation's supermarket checkout...