By Geof Koss
News stories of Michael Jackson, George Clooney and Marv Albert may
reveal our preoccupation with celebrities, but they also symbolize the changing face of
journalism, said Cynthia Sanz, a senior writer at People and the 1997 Douglas S. Looney
Professional-in-Residence at the School. Sanz spent several days at CU in November talking
about magazines and magazine writing.
Sanz pointed out that since People's creation in 1974 as a spin-off of the popular People page in Time magazine, the world of journalism has changed considerably. In the 1970s the media were preoccupied with Vietnam, Watergate and inflation.
This year Ellen Degeneres made the cover of Time proclaiming "Yep, I'm Gay." People, with its short profiles and use of portrait photography, is often credited with redesigning celebrity journalism, a mainstay in today's media, Sanz said.
"I think there's a place for it," Sanz said. "It's these shared stories that bring us together. Our global village has turned out to be more like a small town, and like any small town neighbors, we're interested in each other. Both the flashy folks across town and the ordinary Joes who live down the block."
Doug Looney ('63), a former senior writer at Sports Illustrated and now a special features writer for the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, endowed a program that allows the School to invite journalism professionals to spend several days in Boulder sharing their expertise with students.
From the start, People was legitimized by its affiliation with Time, Sanz said. Today, People outsells its parent magazine and makes about $25 million a year, just under half of Time Inc.'s annual profits, she said.
The proliferation of newsmagazine shows like "60 Minutes," "PrimeTime Live," "Dateline" and "20/20" is evidence of the trend in journalism of combining straight news with celebrity coverage. The first issues of People and Time that came out after Princess Diana's death were the best-sellers ever for both, she said.
For Sanz, the difference between People and supermarket tabloids comes down to ethics and integrity.
"Since Diana's death in particular, we've all re-examined those kinds of practices. We have to rely on good journalistic standards and our own decency and common sense. People doesn't pretend to be Time or Newsweek," she said. "We don't cover everything. But People is not a tabloid either. We don't hire photographers to stalk celebrities. We don't run stories based on rumor and innuendo. We apply the same journalistic standards to stories of celebrity and glitz as other newsmagazines do to stories of war and Washington."
The fact that the magazine has never been successfully sued for libel in its 23-year history is a testament to the integrity of the staff at People, she said. The paper employs fact checkers to verify everything that is to be published in the magazine. "Our readers know that if they read it in People, it has to be true," Sanz said.
Nor does the magazine cater to the whims of celebrities by compromising journalistic standards, she said. People doesn't pay anyone for its stories, despite being approached by stars promising exclusives.
"Often our subjects want control of the story. They want cover and issue guarantees, veto power over writers, photographers, captions and want to put some subjects off entirely."
The answer to such capricious demands, according to Sanz, is "no."
"The bottom line is, if we're not the ones shaping the story, it's not journalism. It's public relations," she said.
A 1984 graduate of the University of Texas-Austin School of Journalism, Sanz began her career at The New York Times as a news clerk before returning to Texas to write features for the Dallas Morning News. In 1989 she was offered a job at People, a position she found lucrative as a "follower of pop culture" when she was growing up.
But Sanz admitted she never envisioned she'd be "writing about George Clooney, the sexiest man alive," when she was in college, but said the trivial aspects of her job are offset in her mind by the stronger news stories.
"In my eight years there, we've tackled AIDS, crime, racism and social issues like teen pregnancy and campus rape, and countless stories about ordinary people doing really extraordinary things," she said. It's because of these stories that she puts up with the best- and worst-dressed lists, she said.
