Jamie Lynn Spears

Did OK!, the celebrity gossip magazine, really pay $1 million for exclusive rights to the Jamie Lynn Spears pregnancy story? US Weekly, a competing whisper weekly, seems to think so, going so far as to print the claim on the cover of US last week.

But, as an article in today’s Times points out, the prevalence of “checkbook journalism” is common among such publications. Paying celebs for exclusive photo and/or interview rights is hardly a novel notion.  read more »

In the wake of OK! magazine's exclusive on Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy, The New York Times writes about the growth of checkbook journalism--that is, paying sources for the rights to stories. 

It's hard to believe that, with competitive pressures increasing across the industry, the trend won't soon migrate from celebrity journalism to more "respectable" outlets, as it has already begun to do in Britain.  Right now the taboo against paying for a story is strong enough to keep most non-celebrity US publications from doing it, but for how long?  

And would such a development necessarily be a bad thing?

On a recent rainy morning, Alyse Grace was standing in the Trader Joe’s on 14th Street, discussing her struggle to be ecologically conscious. “You get to this point where you feel so overwhelmed and so hopeless and so fed up with feeling small,” said Ms. Grace, 29, who traded her 24-packs of Poland Spring for a single nontoxic water bottle after seeing the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth a few months ago.  read more »