Of course I have interest and am aware. I’m not even disputing that specific point with you. The rise of People Magazine was a key media event in the chain you’re talking about.
It isn’t about the rise of People magazine, female publications were fine,there were plenty of sources for females to get their information, what changed was the feminisation of American news that men needed, the boring and dry, fact rich reporting about issues of great importance.
Almost all mainstream media is now a version of women’s magazines - celeb gossip & neurotic sensationalism and what hasn’t totally converted, has diluted itself.
What changed was newspapers ending their women’s section as ‘sexist” and as a “pink ghetto” to keep it from diluting, or contaminating the hard news, they started affirmative action to hire females and blacks to write for the people who were not the number one consumers of newspapers, what they got out of it, was that they lost their hard news audience, and the females and blacks didn’t become newspaper readers to replace them, the same happened to news magazines.
There was a time when men would religiously watch the black and white network news, now it is useless, my guess is that this minor celebrity dominated network news while our serious issues were ignored.