10 Things Tabloids Talk About The Most

BuzzFeed looked at all tabloid covers for the last year, using Jezebel’s Midweek Madness feature, to see how often certain words showed up. We counted the appearances of a variety of important words (we left out things like “the” and “her” and focused on some major nouns and verbs) to find out what showed up the most. The above is what a cover might look like (this one’s fake!) if it combined ten of the most common ones. And the top ten:

2. 10. “Diet”

Diet showed up 25 times in BuzzFeed’s count, earning it tenth place among the words we looked at. So cover lines like “Inside her dangerous 4,200-calorie-a-day diet” (about Kim Kardashian, naturally) were common, but not that common.

3. 9. Divorce

We counted 30 mentions of the word “divorce.” So splits like Bethenny Frankel’s are of concern to tabloid editors, as are possible causes thereof:

4. 8. Cheating

Cheating was mentioned slightly more often than divorce — 34 times.

5. 7. Shocking

“Shocking,” “shock,” or “shocker” appeared 36 times, usually alongside something like “pregnancy” or “love child.”

6. 6. Sex

“Sex” and “sexy” appeared 43 times — no slouch, but it didn’t get the term into the top five.

7. 5. Marriage

“Marrying,” “marriage” and all variants thereof appeared 46 times. Cover lines like “Marrying a monster” or “Marrying for money” were slightly more popular than lines about sex scandals or sexy co-stars.

8. 4. Pregnant

“Pregnant” and “pregnancy” were very common, with 60 mentions. Tabloids love to talk about who’s “pregnant & alone,” “pregnant & betrayed,” or just “pregnant again.”

9. 3. Wedding

Weddings — royal ones, surprise ones, dream ones, etc — are even more popular than pregnancy (or marriage), with 70 mentions.

10. 2. Secret

“Secret” was the runner-up in our count, with 73 mentions — not too surprising since tabloids claim to reveal what stars don’t want you to know.

11. 1. Baby

“Baby” came in first with 148 mentions, over twice as many as its closest competitor. Tabloids are clearly all about reproduction these days — and more than that, they’re actually fairly conservative. Things like babies, marriage, and weddings beat out sex, cheating, and divorce. Maybe tabloid readers (or at least their editors) secretly want everyone to live happily ever after.