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Gossip magazines feature scandalous stories about the personal lives of celebrities. This genre of magazine flourished in North America in the 1950s and early 1960s. The title Confidential alone boasted a monthly circulation in excess of ten million, and it had many competitors, with names like "Whisper," "Dare," "Suppressed", "The Lowdown", "Hush-Hush", and "Uncensored." These magazines included more lurid and explicit content than did the popular newspaper gossip columnists of the time, including tales of celebrity homosexuality and illegal drug use.

The publication generally credited as America's first national weekly gossip tabloid is Broadway Brevities, which was launched in New York in 1916 and edited by a Canadian named Stephen G. Clow. Brevities started out covering high society and the A-list of the New York theater world, but by the 1930s had begun covering more general vice and ran splashy features on sex, drugs, gang violence and crime. This was possibly the first time a gossip magazine had made real efforts to attract readers who weren't members of the elite classes; it didn't presume its readers had a close familiarity with any given social or professional world. In 1932, New York City banned newsstands from selling the racy tabloid, and it appears to have folded sometime around late 1933.

The large-circulation gossip magazines eventually gave way to supermarket tabloids, such as the National Enquirer, and to less scandal-oriented celebrity coverage in magazines like People and Us, though small-circulation publications that harken back to the '50s approach have continued to be published. The history of gossip magazines also includes a few eccentric titles that flaunted the usual rules of acceptable taste, such as the sexually explicit Hollywood Star of the 1970s. Anorak is a modern take on the theme.

• Tabloid
• Gossip columnist

• Hush-Hush Magazine

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