Using Divorce To Sell Magazines

Marriage has long been seen not just as a significant life event, but as a business opportunity, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips.

Whether couples needed it or not, they could drop by the local newsstand for all the glossily presented ideas they could possible want on what to wear to and how to celebrate their marriage -- let alone on planning and raising a family.

And now, with the odds on enduring marriages at about fifty-fifty, there's a new opportunity: If marriage can sell magazines, why not divorce?

David Cordrey is now putting the final touches to Britain's first glossy divorce magazine, New Era.

It will be full of helpful features on how to know when the marriage is over, how to tell the kids, how to divvy up the assets or fight for the CD's you really, really want to keep.

Cordrey says: "We're not pro-divorce and we're not glamorizing divorce. We're showing that there's life after marriage."

The magazine will feature recently divorced or separated celebrities on the cover. And it's created a storm even before it's hit the shelves.

Pro-family groups are outraged, claiming the magazine treats marriage as just another hobby or contemporary fad, like all the others on the shelves. The message, they claim, is: Don't like your hair -- change it. Don't like your spouse -- dump them too.

Anna Lines of the group Family and Youth Concern says the new magazine "puts it on par with the gardening magazines, the home improvement magazines… if we don't like it, rip it up, start again."

This is not the dominant sentiment, on a hopeful wedding day.

But if a marriage goes wrong, the publishers and it seems the advertisers are ready.