We’re suckers for anything OK!-related, mostly because we’re jealous of their interminable budget. You can bet your ass we’d be paying for stories if we could afford it, but alas, all our profits are reinvested into stalking Jake Gyllenhaal.
Then mix in Britney Spears and, well, it’s a Molotov cocktail for our soul. And Lloyd Grove isn’t just lighting the rag — he’s throwing the bottle.
So Brit’s camp wasn’t too pleased when they learned editrix Sarah Ivens & Co. were planning to a run a not so pleasant story on Kevin Federline, who’s parenting abilities aren’t exactly rivaling Kate Moss‘ (then again, who can?).
But Ivens – or, more accurately, publisher Richard Desmond – isn’t about to pass up an opportunity to grab the first pics of baby Sean Preston, so what’s a celebrity rag in bed with the celebrity industry to do?
Change the story, natch.
“We started out making Kevin look like a real a-,” reports an OK! insider. “Britney’s people were not happy with the angle, so the story was changed a bit to reflect a happier married life. The tone became softer, the focus changed.”
OK! even caved on the accompanying poll, changing the original question, “Should Britney forgive Kevin?” to “Should Britney and Kevin get a nanny?”
Says the spy, “It’s ridiculous! We let up on Kevin a whole hell of a lot. It’s just to stay in Brit’s graces to maybe one day get those f-ing baby pics.”
Now why don’t we just leave the K-Fed bashing to the blogs, shall we? We’ve got the time and celeb weeklies, after all, need to refocus their attention on Jennifer Aniston crying.
Oops! British mag caves on article trashing Federline [Lowdown}
And the winner of the Britney Spears baby photo race is .. OK!
As we told you on Wednesday, Richard Desmond‘s attempt at an American tabloid takeover reportedly offered $2 million to Brit and K-Fed for snaps of newborn Preston. Now the mag is saying they’ve secured rights.
Well, that’s what Desmond told Access Hollywood and, ever the investigative journalists, they sent reporter Tim Vincent to quiz OK! editor Sarah Ivens. Hoping to lure her into talking, he told her of his chat with Desmond, to which she replied:
“Has he? He’s a rascal,” she smiled. “Well, Richard’s my boss so he can say that if he wants to.”
Sure he can. Unless, you know, he hasn’t secured the rights.
Having already spent $10 million of the $100 million (over six years) advertising campaign for the U.S. version of OK!, publisher Richard Desmond is looking at dismal returns — and he can’t even blame Sarah Ivens.
Desmond promised advertisers a 350,000 rate base but the celeb rag has been seriously underdelivering .. by as much as two-thirds. With two issues out so far, only about one-tenth of the 1.3 million copies printed have been picked up by those defecting from Star and Us Weekly.
Desmond’s camp is remaining tight-lipped about how their title is actually performing and, unlike its paid-for coverage, claims those circ figures are entirely academic.
We hadn’t been aware that Britain’s Independent was actually just a facade for Richard Desmond‘s press releases, and then we read U.S. OK! editor Ian Burrell‘s masturbatory “article” on how “the Stateside launch of Richard Desmond’s OK! threatens to revolutionise the US celebrity magazine market.”
Apparently, the American OK! is the “the one all New York’s talking about.” He neglects to mention it’s the one we’ve all been “talking about” in very, very sarcastic tones.
But let’s entertain Burrell’s straight-faced attempt at saving face, shall we? He wants ya’ll to know about his real life Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Ivens, who he’s billing as
acting out a scene from Sex and the City where Carrie walks through Manhattan and sees her picture on an advertisement on the side of a New York bus.
She so Carrie, in fact, that after the debut Jessica Simpson issue closed, she didn’t go home — she went out on the town! Like a real New Yorker!
Except that it was “out on the town”-ish.
Says Ivens: “I told Robert Earl, who owns the Planet Hollywood chain, that it was my 30th birthday and I didn’t know what to do, and he said, ‘Well, have the fourth floor,'” she says. “He was fabulous – he generously threw me an Eighties disco in Planet Hollywood with free food and free cocktails all night. Some of my friends flew over from London; the staff were there; my husband and my friends from New York. It was really good fun and we partied all night.”
At. Planet. Hollywood. Which isn’t so much Carrie Bradshaw as it is Lisa Douglas with vertigo.