Does the National Enquirer have a future? As American Media Inc. looks for a buyer for the troubled supermarket tabloid, media experts offered sharply divergent assessments of whether the supermarket staple would ultimate be able to weather its current legal, financial and public relations troubles — and indeed if a buyer would emerge at all.
“I would rather pay money to someone to take it away from me, to save me from all the legal troubles,” Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism, told TheWrap. “I can list 100 reasons why nobody should buy the National Enquirer, but I cannot think of one reason why somebody should buy the National Enquirer.”
Peter Kreisky, a veteran media analyst, predicted that the tabloid was unlikely to survive another five years. “This is the beginning of the ultimate decline of it, unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of a hat,” he said. “The credibility is badly damaged.”