(Via Tim Blair) The Observer delivers a tasty nugget, Life turns nasty for the Queens of Nice:
Rosie O'Donnell, actress, comedian, newly 'out' lesbian, former daytime talk show host and now former publishing impresario, is nothing if not blunt.Eeeewwwww!!!! Good thing it was just her finger!
Here's 'the Queen of Nice', on why a magazine bearing her name would succeed. 'I knew two million Americans would buy it. How? Because that's how many bought my CD - and I can't sing.'
Upon such unvarnished marketing certainties are magazine empires built in modern America.
...
Where Martha Stewart's Living and Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine had gone before, Rosie sought to follow. And for a while it succeeded. Sales rose to more than two million, emulating the success of its lifestyle rivals, but as the months passed Rosie began to lose its lustre. News-stand sales fell by half, to 250,000.
O'Donnell blamed editorial interference from Gruner and Jahr: the publishers blamed their star's obsession with social issues and her bizarre editorial decisions. The July 2001 issue carried a front cover photograph of Rosie holding up her badly infected finger - eye-catching, perhaps, but not what America's magazine buying public has come to expect.
And you'll have to go to Tim Blair's blog to read about the canceled plans for "Tim magazine".
