In 2005, the New York Times ran a front page story on Britney Spears. Prior and since then, Ms. Spears has appeared on hundreds, if not thousands, of tabloid magazine covers. And now, The Atlantic.

The high brow rag's cover story "The Britney Show" is getting plenty of flack – we're guessing most of it's from people who don't even read the magazine, but actual readers are apt to be pissed, too – for lowering its standards to include the decade's biggest celebrity trainwreck in its reportage.

Until this incident, it appeared owner David Bradley was New Yorker-ifying his magazine. Hiring The Week's Justin Smith to head things up, he put more focus on ad sales to boost the bottom line, ramped up its functionally terrible online presence by removing the pay wall (The New Yorker now posts most of its content on its website after posting almost zero), and learned about the fat margins of slapping its name on events like the Aspen Ideas Festival (The New Yorker Festival, anyone?). The only thing it had left to do was serialize its entire back catalogue on CD-ROM.

So why the about face? Though Smith would deny it has anything to do with a five-year plan to turn the magazine around into profitable territory, circulation and newsstand sales are down. And you know what can be a newsstand boon? A Britney Spears cover. (But not a Christina Aguilera one.)

To be sure, we're not looking at an Us Weekly Britney Spears cover story here; rather, The Atlantic's article goes inside The Britney Economy. Who are all those hangers-on? What's the role of the paparazzi? Is she going broke? are the questions we imagine they're trying to answer.

So if The Atlantic isn't a new People magazine, perhaps it's taking a page from the celebrity-meets-finance website MainStreet.com: Take elements of pop culture and use them as a newspeg for launching into your standard editorial voice.

And if we follow this strategy, the next issue will have a cover story on Emperor’s Club, Eliot Spitzer's agency of choice, and how its shuttering, along with all the unusable free publicity from cable news tlaking heads, will affect the global call girl economy. We'd read it.