People magazine made celebrity the default lure across all future attention platforms

Evidence

People was important in and of itself, but also for what it spawned, directly and indirectly. Profits drew imitators, as they inevitably do; in 1977, even the New York Times Company could not resist launching Us Weekly, a close copy of People. Other media, like television, followed naturally, yielding shows like Entertainment Tonight. But the greater influence was more subtle and less measurable: on whatever platform was to be invented, celebrity would become the attention merchant’s go-to bait, offering a lure infinitely more dependable than any more artfully developed content. While not the beginning of celebrity or celebrity culture, People was nevertheless a turning point in both, the start of the “celebrification” of the entire mainstream, including, as we shall see, the lives of many with no reasonable basis for expecting to become famous. Some would experience this as fulfilling the promise of a better life through technology, others as the logical extreme of a race to the bottom begun by the penny papers in the nineteenth century. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader arc of this book: celebrity as the most dependable capture mechanism, echoing earlier chapters on the penny papers and the New York Sun’s hoaxes. — connects to: People magazine reversed decades of issue-oriented magazine journalism — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 756; Celebrity functions as stored attention convertible into commercial influence — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 150
• SEED: The ‘celebrification’ of ordinary people via social media platforms is a direct line from People — an essay on how the lure migrated from magazine to platform.

Broader Connections

• Celebrity functions as stored attention convertible into commercial influence #expands (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 150