KATIE HOLMES & TOM CRUISE: IT'S OVER SAYS RICHARD SPENCER'S IN TOUCH WEEKLY!

I’m stunned!

How could this be?

I will tell you how!

Last week, Keith Kelly reported sagging numbers for the entire celebrity weekly category!

In particular, In Touch Weekly is down 26 percent year-to-date on the newsstand.  (In all fairness, the magazine did raise its price from $1.99 to $2.99 from the previous year.)

I predicted that we would begin to see desperate cover lines and here’s your first example.  I didn’t realize it would happen so fast!

“IT’S OVER” is one of the most successful cover lines in celebrity weekly history.

If you can use this line, your sales will jump dramatically.

In Touch must be confident enough in the story – because this is a VERY STRONG STATEMENT!

So I took a peek and found out the truth.

Indeed, “IT’S OVER!”  BUT, what’s over is “THE FAIRY TALE” between Tom & Katie.

Will the reader feel tricked?  Absolutely.  Does a magazine lose CREDIBILITY when it pulls a stunt like this?  Absolutely.

I’d like to remind you that I predicted the celebrity weeklies would go for Tom & Katie troubles a few weeks ago when Radar published that explosive piece on Scientology!

In other news, In Touch features Heidi Montag saying “I want more surgery.”  

While “IT’S OVER” is one of the strongest combination of words used on a cover — “WANT” is the WORST cover word ever!

I WANT to go outside, I WANT a tropical vacation, I want…you get the point.   Everyone WANTS something that hasn’t happened yet.

And then we have Ashlee Simpson’s Baby News!  Boring!

Bottom Line: Big sales for In Touch and disappointed readers.