At this rate, the British gossip magazine that just arrived on our shores will go broke before too long. You may remember that OK! made some news when it proudly announced it would pay celebrities to appear on its pages and give them approval over what was written.

Now the magazine is on a spending spree to live up to its word. It recently plopped down $2 mill for blurry photos of Britney Speers’ baby (or was it a cabbage patch doll), plus another $1.5 mill for the birthing. Today it was reported that the glam glossy forked over $3 million for Ashton & Demi’s wedding pics.

I pity the publisher who has to come up with the ad dollars and single-copy sales to cover this nut since these photo deals surely prohibited syndication rights.

Klein, Versace, Jacobs. These branded icons of the fashion world have spent millions to cultivate their public images. So when fashion insider and New York Times “Fashion Diary” scribe Guy Trebay today pictured each of them in a front-page Styles story (in the newspaper, not online), pegged to the travails of cocaine-waifed Kate Moss and the industry’s dogged problems with drugs, it likely hit these fashion houses like a bad review in WWD.

Of course, it’s no secret that many of today’s popular culture icons are plagued with all sorts of unsavory habits and behavior. Still, to the casual viewer of “ET’s The Insider” or “Extra” or reader of The Post’s Page Six or US Magazine, one may never all the dark details. This may be due to their publicists’ efforts to mask their clients’ seamier sides, but likely because media fragmentation and the 24/7 tenuous nature of news today, shortens a story’s legs.

It takes Kate Moss publicly being quoted as having little remorse or Courtney Love exposing her dark side in a drug-induced stupor on national TV to give their stories legs, and their PR reps heartburn.

The title of this blog posting caught my eye: “Can the PR industry and the blogosphere be friends.” In delving into this blogger’s take on our industry, I was drawn to this quote:

“PR is an organised effort to control the thinking of a targeted group of people, which constitutes propaganda. If the PR industry couldn’t fulfil [sic] that function, the industry would cease to exist.”

What a crock! Once again, some activist Brit with a fleeting sense of what we do as a profession attempts to broadly paint PR professionals as propagandists. Clearly, his anonymous posting (very unblog-like) leads me to believe that he is hiding an agenda or past affiliation with PR Watch or some rabidly anti-PR group.

Let me ask: is it propaganda to advise a CEO to quickly make the facts of a crisis known to all affected parties? Do PR pros have sinister intentions when tasked to use the news media to alert a “group of people” that a devastating hurricane is about to hit? What about the PR professional’s role in getting the word out about a product recall, or a consumer scam?

Sure, as PR people seek to reconcile their practice with an increasingly influential citizen journalism movement, who’s to say that the transparency that permeates (and defines) the blogosphere will not be practiced by the new breed of PR pros? If the author of this posting had spent more time perusing Global PR BlogWeek , he would have observed an earnest intention by the participants therein to play by the blogosphere’s still-evolving rules.

His groupings of the three types of PR practitioners — the first two being harmless — is insightful, but who’s to say that the third nefarious group operating on the public policy front couldn’t eventually come to embrace open communications? It will take some doing (and perhaps a new administration), but it certainly is an idea worth pursuing. If not, the profession will be hard-pressed moving forward.