In the wake of the magazine’s sale to American Media Inc. for $100 million, former US Weekly editor-in-chief Janice Min has torn into her former employer with a blistering Buzzfeed post entitled “25 things you didn’t know about US Weekly.”
Min (former co-president and CCO of The Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Media Group) pulls zero punches. She offers cold cut downs of former owner Jann Wenner, US Weekly, and Wenner’s Rolling Stone.
Some highlights (scroll down for the coldest cut of all):
* Profit margins under her watch were insane.”Before Instagram and Snapchat, the publication made $1.80 per issue sold on the newsstand after the initial 500,000 sale.” (And yes, she alludes to the bath Wenner took on the sale this month, since he bought back Disney’s half of US Weekly for nearly $300 million in 2007.)
* Min confirms that, yes, some celebs do indeed arrange their own paparazzi shots.
* During her last year helming US Weekly, median income for readers was higher than that of Vogue and Vanity Fair readers.
* She’s apparently not fond of Jann Wenner, who she says is “not Just Like Us.” Bono, a friend of Wenner’s, apparently used to just show up to walk around the company’s offices.
* “Roaches once fell from the ceiling onto the conference table during the morning meeting in our offices on Sixth Avenue.” Gross.
* When Britney Spears shaved her head, US Weekly was second on the scene. CNN was first.
But Min saved the cruelest dig for last. Following an earlier point noting that “The bros from Rolling Stone never, ever talked to us,” she concluded with a bonus 26th thing that distinguished her Us Weekly from Wenner’s Rolling Stone:
“We never ran a discredited story about a rape at the University of Virginia.”
Ouch.