Business

TomKat breakup a boon for celebrity mags

The dissolved marriage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes has been a celebrity magazine bonanza — at least judging by newsstand sales in the first post-split week.

People was the biggest winner, with its newsstand sales climbing 27 percent to 1.4 million last week from what it was selling at the end of last year.

Us Weekly, which also went big with a TomKat cover, saw sales surge to 720,000 newsstand copies last week compared to the end of 2011.

In Touch also benefited, but not as drastically, with newsstand sales of 632,000, sources said. A year ago it was selling better than that, but it had slumped earlier this year, along with most of the category.

OK!, which due to its pre-weekend print deadline — it goes to press on Thursdays whereas most of its rivals close on Monday or Tuesday — missed the first week of the bust-up and went with a cover detailing why Jennifer Aniston turned down a marriage proposal.

It had TomKat-less sales estimated to be below 200,000.

Star managed a small stamp-like TomKat bust-up on the front cover, which featured as its main subject a Jessica Simpson diet secret. That effort sold about 400,000 — which was below the 437,199 that the magazine sold on newsstands in the second half of 2011 — but a boost from earlier this year.

Life & Style also had a contrarian cover, about how Queen Elizabeth was humiliating Kate, the Dutchess of Cambridge, which brought in sales of 360,000. That was below the 378,758 it sold last year, but above the numbers it was hitting earlier this year.

The TomKat-fueled shot in the arm was badly needed for the glossies, sources said, because in the first half of 2012 newsstand sales had been falling by double digits. Year over year, newsstand sales across the industry were down 22 percent.

“A year ago, the industry was still selling 4.5 million copies a week,” said the executive, “but by the beginning of this year, it was down to 3.5 million copies in most weeks.”

He said the one-week surge on the TomKat news pushed the market up close to 4 million once again.

This week, to no one’s surprise, all the celebrity weeklies are going back to the TomKat well for more. All devoted cover space to the amicable divorce that Holmes appears to have wrangled out of Cruise.

NOLA follies

Pressure is building on the Newhouse family to sell the embattled New Orleans Time-Picayune to local ownership as it encounters strong local opposition to its announced plan to cut the print edition from daily to just three days a week this fall.

One source close to the situation said that at least two potential buyers are waiting in the wings.

Donald Newhouse, an owner of parent company Advance Publications, who along with his brother SI Newhouse, Jr. is a family patriarch, said the company is not interested in selling.

“I have received the letter,” he told Media Ink. “We have no intention of selling the Times-Picayune, and we are not selling it.”

On July 6, an ad-hoc group of community leaders sent a letter to the entire Newhouse clan — 22 family members in all — urging that instead of pressing ahead with plans to cut the paper’s print editions that family should sell to a new local owner.

The late Norman Newhouse purchased the T-P nearly 50 years ago and had moved to the Big Easy to raise his family.

“Unfortunately and sadly, the considerable goodwill your family enterprise has created in New Orleans in the last 50 years was dissipated in just a few short months because of the decision that took our entire community by surprise,” said the letter.

“Advance Publications and its leadership have lost the trust and credibility of a significant segment of the community,” it said.

The letter was signed by 14 leaders of the city, including former Saints QB Archie Manning (the dad of current NFL QBs Peyton and Eli Manning) Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond, jazz great Wynton Marsalis, Democratic political strategist James Carville, and his Republican strategist wife, Mary Matalin, The Rev. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University, Norman C. Francis, president of Xavier University and Scott Cowen, president of Tulane University.

“If you have ever valued the friendship you have shared with our city and your loyal readers, we ask that you sell the Times-Picayune,” implored the letter. “Our city wants a daily printed paper, needs a daily printed paper and deserves a daily printed paper.”

One source said that “Save the Picayune” signs have begun sprouting up across the city. “It’s not just a pocket of one or two neighborhoods,” said one prominent New Orleans citizen involved with the effort. “It is the lower 9th Ward to the Garden District to the Lakefront District.”

kkelly@nypost.com