Landon Jones helped create a fame-obsessed culture. Now he has regrets

Landon Jones says he regrets some of the ways he has covered celebrities, and how that has shaped people's view of fame. 

Jones, who worked for People magazine — including eight years as managing editor — says people used to be famous for their accomplishments, but now they're famous just for being famous. 

People magazine, which started in 1974, specializes in telling the stories of celebrities, including special editions such as Best & Worst Dressed and Sexiest Man Alive.

His new book, Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans, tackles that topic. Jones spoke with The Sunday Magazine guest host David Common about the history and psychology of celebrity, and how he thinks celebrity news needs to change. 

I think back to when you started working at People, when it was just being launched, it was back in the mid '70s and you write that at the time the word celebrity wasn't even really in your vocabulary. Is that actually the case? 

That's actually the case. We never used it. We thought we were writing a magazine that would describe extraordinary people of all kinds. They could be athletes, they could be politicians, they could be writers, they could be a radio host, they could be so many things. They could also be ordinary people who had done extraordinary things. 

But we did not write or use the word celebrity at all. It came later with the arrival of the television celebrities in the '70s. 

Do you remember a moment where things really changed for People magazine?

The first 17 issues of People all failed. They did not make rate base, as advertisers call it. But then we put a TV star on the cover for the first time, and his name was Telly Savalas from a show called Kojak. And he was shirtless. 

It sold gangbusters and the women all wrote in and said, "well, what about the rest of him?" And that told us something about celebrity and the name recognition and face recognition and in his case, chest recognition. 

You write about some of the rules that an early editor came up with at People for who to put on the cover. And I want to quote your book. "Young stars sell better than old. Rich is better than poor. TV is better than movies. Anything is better than politics." And then there's another rule, more troubling, "write about a woman with a problem." Why that rule?

Yes, that was my rule. And the more you put a young woman with a problem on the cover, the more people wanted to read it and the more issues were sold. 

And so the quintessential example of that was Princess Diana, who was a young woman with a problem, and the problem was her marriage. But people were consumed with interest in her because she was indeed that.

We know the terrible effect that fame and the desire to constantly have photos and gossip and information [had] on Princess Diana, the celebrity paparazzi even extending into her children's lives…. So I've got to ask you, Lanny, in retrospect, do you have qualms about the way celebrity journalism has gone about its business?