Handicapping How the Gossip Glossies Will Cover Jennifer Hudson's Family Tragedy
When the celebrity weeklies unveil their new covers tomorrow, we can bet they'll be dominated by coverage of the terrible Jennifer Hudson news story, in which the singer and actress's mother, brother, and 7-year-old nephew were murdered on Friday. And we suppose they're right to, it being big news and all. Since the issues went to print yesterday, it's up to the websites to tease what each publication has in store (and to keep up with breaking developments). So what might each magazine be featuring? We took a look at five magazines' websites today to try to see if there were any hints of what their coverage will look like tomorrow. People, the longstanding classy version of the other tabloids, has a story (kinda far down the page, honestly) about Jennifer's bond with her mother, featuring recollections about Darnell Donerson from Jennifer's acting coach and from people in Donerson's Chicago neighborhood. It's the kind of sad human interest story that People has made their name doing. Expect sidebar reactions from American Idol judges (Hudson was a contestant on the show) and maybe one of the bigger gets, like Beyonce, Hudson's Dreamgirls costar. Us Weekly reports at a more breathless, staccato clip, giving us gory details about the number of times Hudson's young nephew was shot and quoting from Hudson's sister's MySpace, in which she mourns her lost loved ones and imagines them as her guardian angels now. In your face awfulness. InTouch, Life & Style, and OK! aren't giving the story as much prominence as Us (their older and more popular sibling). OK! does a small dissection of the dispute that lead to the whole tragedy InTouch covers Idol judge Randy Jackson's reaction to the sad news. And Life & Style has nothing about the incident on their sparsely updated site. So, once again, it looks as though Us Weekly leads the pack toward getting the scoop, though their hand at the necessary quiet, soft-touch pieces is not as nimble as People's. Us ought to get the early lead while People follows up in the coming weeks with a punch-in-the-gut Hudson interview. Or not. Maybe we'll get surprised with a big Exclusive. It could happen.