The Sun-Herald

The Tribal Mind: Faces that sell and repel

For daily updates on how Australians entertain themselves, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.

by David Dale
Lets call it The Paltrow Paradox. Gwyneth Paltrow is a smart, attractive, accomplished woman. At the same time Gwyneth Paltrow is regarded by US publishers as a giant turnoff for readers. You might say she is America's Nicole Kidman, who is alleged to provoke the same reaction in her compatriots.

Paltrow's image crisis was revealed last month when Entertainment Weekly magazine published a cover story on the stars of the forthcoming sequel to Iron Man. It displayed Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke, but not even a glimpse of Paltrow, who plays Iron Man's assistant Pepper Potts. The New York Post asked Entertainment Weekly why she was absent, and reported that "rightly or wrongly, the editors feel any cover with Paltrow is newsstand suicide." Apparently Americans, particularly female Americans, find her annoying.

Women's Wear Daily followed up this insight by listing who was on the cover of the worst-selling issues of the main glossies over the past year. The faces that sank a thousand ships were: Rachel Weisz (Vogue, which revealed that Paltrow had been on its second-worst seller), Nicole Kidman (Glamour), Jessica Simpson (Cosmopolitan), Katherine Heigl (Vanity Fair), Carrie Underwood (Elle), Hilary Swank (W), Anne Hathaway (InStyle), Drew Barrymore (Harper's Bazaar) and Jennifer Connolly (Marie Claire).

(By contrast, America's top selling cover faces included Keira Knightley, Angelina Jolie, Eva Longoria, Scarlett Johansson, Victoria Beckham and "the women of Sex and the City".)

The editors of Australia's magazines are notoriously reluctant to reveal their worst selling issues, so we are left to speculate that over the past 12 months, Paltrow, Heigl and Kidman must have appeared often on New Idea, Woman's Day and NW.

Those were the big losers among the weeklies in sales figures released this week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Since mid 2008, New Idea has lost 26,000 buyers, Woman's Day has lost 23,000, and NW has lost 15,000.

Or is poor choice of cover images too shallow an explanation for the collapse of Australia's glossies and gossipies? Instead we might need to raise the C word as the possible problem here - as in Credibility. In March, New Idea ran a cover which purported to show Bec Hewitt (former soap star and current tennis wife) with the "new man in her life". New Idea has since admitted that it made a huge mistake, because the man in the picture was actually Hewitt's brother. The magazine seems to have taken the word of a paparazzo.

New Idea is not alone among weeklies in taking such a casual approach to fact-checking, and it would be nice to interpret the figures as meaning readers are punishing their former favourites for constantly deceiving them. But that might be wishful thinking -- in the same year that New Idea lost its 26,000 fans, another weekly called Famous gained 13,000 buyers (bringing it to 80,000 a week) and a new gossipy called Grazia entered the market, selling 66,000 a week. So it seems many Australians have not been able to give up their weekly wallow in scandal.

Lets look more closely at the changes in Australia's reading habits over the 12 months to June 30 ...

Australia's favourite magazines:
1 Women's Weekly 491,500 a month
2 Woman's Day 408,000 a week
3 Better Homes and Gardens 370,000 a month
4 New Idea 325,000 a week
5 Readers Digest 325,000 a month
6 That's Life! 302,000 a week
7 Super Food Ideas 271,000 a month
8 Take 5 246,000 a week
9 TV Week 224,000 a week
10 Cosmopolitan 166,000 a month
11 Australian Geographic 141,000 a month
12 NW 140,000 a week

The biggest losers: Cleo, NW, New Idea, Super Food Ideas, Good Taste, Alpha.

The biggest improvers: Famous, Better Homes and Gardens, Dolly, Shop Till You Drop, Notebook, Time Australia.

Can you discern a pattern? Go to Comments to offer your theory on what it means, and to tell us whose face would make you buy or avoid a magazine

David Dale is the author of Who We Are -- A snapshot of Australia today (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.