Business

Celebrity mags sag, food rises

Consumers apparently have a growing appetite for food magazines, but their love affair with celebrity-helmed magazines — and the glossy weeklies that track celebrity lives — seems to be cooling.

In the first half of the year, newsstand sales at O, the Oprah Magazine, dropped 15.8 percent, while Every Day with Rachael Ray was down 23 percent from the year-earlier period.

Single-digit downers included Cooking with Paula Deen, off 9 percent, and Martha Stewart Living, which slipped 3.7 percent, according to latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Among the weeklies that track celebrities, only In Touch posted a gain — up 3.4 to 770,088 copies — nearly catching No. 2 Us Weekly’s 780,000.

Celebrity-driven magazines “seem to be losing steam on the newsstands,” said Jack Hanrahan, publisher of Circ Matters Newsletter.

While single-copy sales make up only one part of the picture — most glossies rely on subscriptions for the bulk of their circulation — newsstand sales are closely watched to gauge consumer receptiveness and relative “hotness.”

Overall, the report showed a 7.7 percent decline in newsstand sales, according to MagNet, a sales tracker. Factoring in cover-price hikes, the dollar decline was 6.1 percent at $2,076,203,857 compared to $2,211,757,093 a year earlier, MagNet said

At Hearst, the surprising upstart Food Network Magazine sold 323,586 copies as part of its 1,399,894 total circulation.