Aliens Take Over The Tabloids!

By Paul Gray

Last week's news should have set press watchdogs yipping and gnashing. American Media, the company that already owns the National Enquirer and the Star, the two top-selling supermarket tabloids in the U.S., announced that it would pay $105 million to buy the Globe, the third biggest. The deal would also give American Media ownership of other Globe titles, including the Sun and the National Examiner, putting nearly all of America's tabloid gossip under one corporate umbrella. This raises big journalistic issues: Are the heady days when the tabs fought for JonBenet Ramsey and Prince William exclusives about to end in polite cooperation? Will tabloid journalism ever be guilty fun again?

David Pecker, the former chief of Hachette Filipacchi (Elle, George) who became president and CEO of American Media in May, vows that the Globe acquisition will actually lead to a greater diversity among the big three tabloids. After he and his partners, including ex-Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, bought American Media for $850 million, Pecker cast a cold eye on his new possessions, which had been losing circulation for five years. (The Enquirer, the Star and their wacky sibling, Weekly World News, sell a combined 4.4 million copies weekly, down 35% since 1994.) One reason, he contends, is that "the Enquirer and the Star were really competing against each other."

Pecker, 48, a hard-driving executive, began by spending $5 million to redesign the Enquirer and the Star. He set out to soften stories with a harder edge and to reposition the tabloids as rivals, for both readers and advertisers, of mainstream publications like People (which, like Time, is published by Time Inc.). Casual headline scanners in grocery check-out lines may not have noticed the difference yet, but Pecker claims it exists. "If there's a Hollywood scandal, the investigative portion will be done by the National Enquirer. The impact on celebrities, on their careers, that will be done by the Star."

What then are Pecker's plans for the Globe, given its reputation as the naughtiest and most ethically challenged of the big three tabloids? (It was the Globe that set up Frank Gifford's hotel tryst with a former airline attendant, prompting a censorious New York Times op-ed piece by Enquirer editor Steve Coz.) Pecker says the Globe will "absolutely not" pull such a stunt again. Still, he says, "we're going to cover the spice and the controversy of the story. It's going to really be, shall I say, the unvarnished story."

To which the dedicated Globe reader may respond, "Uh-oh." Pecker seems determined to do to tabloids what Disney did to New York City's Times Square--i.e., clean things up for family consumption. Since tabloid-type stories now crop up so frequently in mainstream print and on TV, Pecker wants the real tabloids to get more respect--and a bigger share of the action. "Right now only 8% of our revenue is advertising," he says. "I think there's an opportunity to get it up to 15% to 20%." To lure upscale advertisers, Pecker has swallowed a weekly loss of $100,000 by banning those blurbs hawking psychic healers, herbal remedies and the like in the Enquirer and the Star.

Also vanishing are the shock-value headlines that the old Enquirer once made infamous. Compared with "KILLS PAL AND EATS PIECES OF HIS FLESH," recent efforts like "DEMI TO WED!" seem a little pallid. And when a Star staffer member was fired recently for getting into a fracas with the L.A. police while pursuing a story, tabloid veterans shuddered. Not so long ago, the reporter might have been given a bonus.

--By Paul Gray. Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York