News and gossip!

Kudos to Us Weekly for being the only tabloid wise enough to realize Americans might be just as interested in Beyonce and Jay-Z’s (maybe) wedding as, say, a white girl like Katherine Heigl’s.

Janice Min might be the only celeb weekly editor who understands the newsstand lure of black celebs; her magazine’s Janet Jackson “How I Lost 40 Pounds” issue was among its best selling ever (though it’s said that Min was on leave, and didn’t have much to do with it).

While the paparazzi hounded the Tribeca apartment building where Jay-Z and Beyonce supposedly got married, and the local television news had a field day guessing why everyone was wearing white, OK!, In Touch, Star, and Life & Style all ignored the week’s biggest story on their covers.

How come?

Because of the industry adage that blacks, no matter how famous, cannot move a magazine. Had Beyonce tried to sell her wedding pics, one tabloid editor says she would’ve fetched as little as $250k. (Point of reference: Christina Aguilera sold her baby photos for $1.5 million to People, who assumed they would lose money on the deal.)

Granted, Eva Longoria (of Mexican descent) and Tony Parker (black) managed to sell their wedding photos to OK! for $2 million last year, but it’s arguable Longoria has transcended her skin color (yes, that’s as awful as that sounds) and, when combined with her publicity whoring, it isn’t so far fetched. (And let’s not kid ourselves that Parker was even part of the equation.)

Instead, this week the tabloids went with much less buzzworthy stories: In Touch had Britney relapsing, Life & Style chronicled Jennifer Lopez’s 40 pound weight loss, Star did a similar pictorial on post-baby weight transformations, and OK! just plain made up a story about Jennifer Aniston and Orlando Bloom getting cozy.