People succeeded as a sanitized mainstream upgrade of scandal rags

Evidence

Now, in truth, Heiskell’s idea was not quite the innovation he would claim. Celebrity magazines long pre-existed People; gossip and scandal rags about Broadway stars and society swells had been around since before Luce established Time. More recently the National Enquirer had occupied the niche once filled by publications with names like Confidential or Hush-Hush and cover lines like “We tell the facts and name the names” or “Uncensored and off the record.” But these had been coarse, down-market operations, devoted to exposing salacious stories with little regard for the truth. People’s real innovation was as an upgrade of this format for a mainstream audience. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 757

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the classic pattern of upmarket repackaging of downmarket content — connects to later tabloid-to-midmarket moves and to mainstream adoption of formerly fringe formats. — connects to: Gossip media transformed ordinary tech workers into public characters it could cover — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 366