The US magazine Vanity Fair said on Friday it saw a record-breaking subscription after US President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that the publication is “dead”.
Xinhua news agency quoted the magazine’s parent company Conde Nest as saying that more people had signed up for Vanity Fair on Thursday than they did on any single day for all of the group’s publications, which includes Vogue, the New Yorker and GQ.
Trump on Thursday tweeted: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of Vanity Fair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead!”
The harsh remarks came after Vanity Fair ran an article that described a restaurant in the Trump Tower as possibly “the worst restaurant in America”.
Vanity Fair capitalised on Trump’s tweet by putting up a banner on its website saying: “The magazine Trump doesn’t want you to read. Subscribe Now!”
This pattern of benefitting from Trump’s apparent negative tweets has been repeated on other media publications.
The New York Times, which repeatedly appeared in Trump’s twitter as “the failing New York Times”, reported a 41,000 subscription increase in the week after the election, a “dramatic rate of growth”.
Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, another punchbag of Trump’s, admitted in a forum on November 30 that this year was the networks’s best year in history, across the board.
