Dissecting Celebrity Culture: A Review of Us Weekly

Us Weekly Has All the Celebrity Gossip

Us Weekly’s is a fashion and celebrity magazine. The cover had pictures and headlines about celebrities with their children along with celebrity rivalries and breakup exclusives. It was strange that the back cover was an electronic ad. It would be more visually appealing if it tied in better with the imagery on the cover. This issue was a mom’s special, so Us Weekly had a lot of celebrity baby news as well as pregnancy speculations. They had children’s fashion for both boys and girls, along with ideas for the summer, which played into the interest of mothers.

Inside the magazine, articles are very short. The longest was about two columns split up across three pages. The longest article was actually an

advertisement about depression. It was two pages of solid text. It didn’t flow with the rest of the magazine, because the font was smaller and the text boxes were larger compared to the other pages. The rest of the content was photos. Out of the one hundred and sixteen pages in the magazine, there are about ten blocks of writing that would be considered articles. The rest of the text blocks were more like little blurbs or celebrities’ quotes. They’re one or two sentence. Very few were longer. The main stories of the magazine relied more on the images of celebrities than in depth stories about current events in Hollywood to convey their message to the reader.
Headlines used bright colors that are formatted to stand out. They commonly contain words like hot, love, stars, exclusive, and shocking in bold letters. The images are high quality and well designed. They’re placed so the eyes can easily travel across the page. The graphics are also well placed and good additions to help convey the overall message. The photo editing and cropping is also well executed. The images are all clear and high quality.
There were three pages about “Who Wore it Best?” which had pictures of famous women who wore similar outfits and let viewers vote on who looks the best by going to a website.

There’s also a quiz for readers to take about fashion. In the “Hot Pic” section, images played toward shocking and awe, like a couple censored nude images of celebrities or an unflattering photo of a celebrities caught making weird facial expression. They also included celebrities’ quotes that were aimed at causing controversy. An example of this would be the feature about celebrities swimming with sharks as well as celebrities attending night club events. Other articles aiming to stir up gossip were about celebrities that might be breaking up or getting a divorce, such as a fight between Justin Bieber and Orlando Bloom at a

nightclub.
Multiple pages are the latest fashion trends. Photographs showing celebrities wearing designer gowns are lined up next to one another. In another section, it shows new hairstyles that celebrities are trying, most are bright unnatural hair colors.
Advertisements were directed at women.

Most of them are fashion oriented, such as: skin care, feminine hygiene, makeup, clothes, and shoes. The other types of ads were electronic like phones and tablets. Most companies used images of children or fashionably dressed people using the devices, so they still are trying to appeal to the woman demographic. For mothers, they also had ads for baby food, clothes and even one for a pregnancy test.

Even though this was an issue for mothers, when I looked through a few older ones, it had the same fashion trends and the advertisements were directed toward the female demographic with similar makeup and feminine hygiene ads.

Us Weekly practice of using more pictures than articles also reflects the lifestyle of a busy woman or mom. Moms don’t have time to read long articles, so skimming through pages and being able to decipher the general message quickly would be more appealing than a Readers Digest article. The magazine is rather inexpensive at $4.99 and a new edition comes out weekly. The paper is thin, but the quality makes it so the imagery prints clear.

I would determine that the intended audience for Us Weekly is women who are into fashion, celebrity news, and gossip. The more precise audience for this issue would be mothers in all stages of life who are interested in how celebrity moms approach

motherhood.