Supermarket Tabloids

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With headlines like “Angelina Walks in on Brad & Jen,” “Extraterrestrials Follow the Teachings of Oprah Winfrey,” and “Al-Qaeda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes,” supermarket tabloids push the limits of credibility. Although they are published on newsprint, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which checks newspaper and magazine circulation figures to determine advertising rates, counts weekly tabloids as magazines. Tabloids have their historical roots in newspapers’ use of graphics and pictorial layouts in the 1860s and 1870s. But the modern U.S. tabloid began with the founding of the National Enquirer by William Randolph Hearst in 1926. Its popularity inspired the founding of other tabloids like Globe (1954) and Star (1974) as well as the adoption of a tabloid style by some general-interest magazines, such as People and Us Weekly. Today, tabloid magazine sales are down from their peak in the 1980s, but these publications continue to have a devoted following.