For Celebrity Magazine, Pregnancy Is a Bonus

OK!, the celebrity magazine, could not possibly have purchased all the attention it enjoyed in late December after it got the scoop that Jamie Lynn Spears, the younger and until then less sensational sister of the troubled pop queen Britney Spears, was three months pregnant.

Or could it? It is widely assumed within the publishing industry that OK! paid the Spears family for the exclusive rights to the pregnancy news. US Weekly, another celebrity magazine, cited sources who said that Jamie Lynn’s mother, Lynne Spears, had sold the pregnancy story for $1 million, printing the assertion on the cover of last week’s issue.

Checkbook journalism is hardly a secret within the star-struck world of glossy magazines. The publications often pay for photos of weddings and babies, perhaps most famously in June 2006 when People won a fierce bidding war for the first photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s daughter, Shiloh.

Although People said that the widely reported $4.1 million price tag was not accurate, it did not offer an alternative figure; editors say that disclosing prices would work against efforts to keep costs down.

Purchasing news of a pregnancy, however, is unusual. The two-year-old American edition of OK!, like its 14-year-old British counterpart, has freely acknowledged paying for “relationships” with some celebrities, but Sarah Ivens, editor of the American edition, declined to discuss specific deals or dollar figures.

“If there’s something out there, there will be a bidding war,” Ms. Ivens said. “We’re not bidding against ourselves.”

When asked why she was less hesitant than some competitors to acknowledge the purchase of photos, Ms. Ivens said: “I’m not very good at lying.”

The interview with Jamie Lynn, 16, and her mother certainly drew copious attention to OK!, which sells far fewer copies than competitors like People and US Weekly, and provoked speculation about the relationship between OK! and the Spears family, which had been strained by a disastrous photo shoot with Britney six months ago.

But Ms. Ivens kept in touch with the Spears family — she said that she spoke regularly to its members — and said that when the family decided to announce Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy, it contacted OK! first. The six-page interview barely mentioned Britney.

Word of the 16-year-old star’s pregnancy — and of OK!’s exclusive on the story — seeped out on the Internet on Dec. 18. By the next day, when the magazine reached newsstands, the news was splashed across the cover of The New York Post, treated as the lead story on NBC’s “Today” show and publicized on the home page of People.com. In each case OK! was cited as breaking the story.

Tom Morrissy, publisher of the American version of OK!, promptly sent an e-mail message to prospective advertisers extolling all the coverage the story had received. The Jamie Lynn issue of OK! sold a record number of copies — nearly two million, roughly twice the usual number.

“What advertisers care about are buzz-worthy stories and volume,” Mr. Morrissy said. He said that OK!’s financial arrangements with celebrities had not factored into its conversations with advertisers.

Securing such scoops, whatever their cost, seems to be part of OK!’s growth strategy, as each exclusive article raises awareness of the brand. In 2007 the OK! publications, which are owned by Northern & Shell, a British media company, secured the first photos of Eva Longoria’s wedding and of Larry Birkhead and Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter, Dannielynn.

The magazine’s latest photo exclusive of the wedding of Katherine Heigl, a star of “Grey’s Anatomy,” was published this week.

Some celebrity-watchers have speculated that the Spears family would be paid not for the pregnancy news, but for the first photos of the mother and baby sometime next year. The spokeswoman for Jamie Lynn Spears and representatives for the Spears family did not return phone calls or e-mail messages, and Ms. Ivens would not clarify the matter.

To the outside world, OK! did not look like the logical choice for the Spears family to take the story. Back in July Britney Spears had agreed to sit for an OK! interview and cover shoot — pitched as a friendly “comeback” profile of the increasingly ridiculed entertainer — but had acted erratically, destroyed expensive dresses and abruptly walked out.

After news of the photo shoot leaked to gossip Web sites, the magazine decided to publish a three-page depiction of the day. The issue, headlined “Britney’s Meltdown,” sold 1.2 million copies, the magazine’s best performance at the time.

The text was still relatively delicate, concluding: “At OK! we’d love to have our old Britney back. But what we experienced was a young girl who is desperately in need of help.” Still, the article suggested that Ms. Ivens would start taking a harder line toward the celebrities it typically fawned over.

“We got tougher,” Ms. Ivens said. “But the truth is, everyone in the family came back to OK! We have a really good, trusting relationship with the Spears family, and the story didn’t change that.”

news source : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/business/media/02ok.html?_r=1&ref=media&oref=slogin