By The Washington Post
Published: 6/12/06
Excerpt:
People magazine isn't saying much about the deal it made that landed Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's new little bundle, Shiloh Nouvel, on its cover.
As you may have heard by now, the magazine reportedly paid more than $4 million to be the first to run pictures of the duo's daughter in North America. And though its managing editor, Larry Hackett, would not confirm the price tag for the rights to the photographs, he didn't hesitate to do a little chest-thumping about the coup.
"Readers expected People to have those pictures of personal moments," Hackett said. "I want readers out there to know ... that they can come to us."
But if you publish such pricey pictures, will the gawkers come?
A spokesman for People said it's too early to measure newsstand sales of the issue, which hit the racks [Friday, June 9]. The publication did raise the price on the weekly, however, from its usual $3.49 to $3.99. The magazine's Web site received 25 million hits [on June 8], Hackett said, calling the response "beyond avid." ...
...Kelly McBride, an ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, was neither surprised nor shocked at People's decision.
Magazines such as People regularly pay extraordinary sums to paparazzi for celebrity pictures, and the first unauthorized photo of the Pitt-Jolie baby would have commanded millions in a bidding war anyway, McBride said.
"Someone was going to make a profit out of this," she said. Pitt and Jolie "just said, 'Let's take control of this ourselves.' They figured out a way to intervene in a negative, vulturistic, nasty process that is created by the demand for these photos. They saw a way to make something good come out of it" since they have promised to donate the proceeds to charity.
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