Us Weekly Editor: 'I Care' About Celebrity News

"I think any woman who's questioned about her interest in celebrity should turn and ask her husband, 'Why do you want to watch the Yankees-Red Sox baseball game? What does it matter to you? It is man chasing a ball around a field. It is of zero consequence to you,'" she said. "And that's sort of the same as wondering, you know, if Jessica Simpson is dating Tony Romo."

Us Weekly magazine averages a circulation of 12 million per issue.

(ABC News Photo Illustration/Courtesy Us Weekly)
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Worth a Thousand Words

The first order of business for Min and the staff is to close an issue and select a cover. On this day, the leading contenders were Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, the villain couple from "The Hills," an MTV reality show made even more popular by eight Us Weekly covers.

And then there's singer Mariah Carey, whose roller coaster career is reaching another high with a new album … and a new body. "A lot of people are wondering, what in the world did she do to lose all that weight?" said Min. "For this mass audience going to the grocery to buy Us Weekly, that's very relatable, I don't think there's a woman alive who can't relate to the idea of yo-yo dieting."

The singer didn't have time to sit for a shoot, so Min would only put her on the cover if Mariah's people could send them the right photo.

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"That's not bad," she says, examining one choice, "but again, you don't see enough of her body."

The right photo, either posed or candid, can make or break an issue. And in the age of publicity hunger, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.

The person in charge of these "candid" shots is news photo editor Peter Grossman. He says his dream photograph is "one that tells the story just by looking at it."

"You know, the dream photographs to me are the last pictures of Brad and Jen on the beach," he said. "The other side of that was the first picture of Brad and Angelina together in Africa. These are both pictures that we had exclusively on our cover … you didn't need words, you just looked at them and it was like, 'Oh my God.'"

The Word 'News' Means Something Different to 'Us'

Grossman says that when it comes to respecting celebrities' privacy, "there are certain lines that we don't cross."

"If someone is trying to take a picture into someone's house that's not even something that we consider running," Grossman said. "On the flipside though, everyone has something about their job that they don't like, and I think being a celebrity is these people's job and this is sort of one of the things that comes along with it that is probably not their favorite part of the job. What these people are doing is news."