Is celebrity news,news?

‘Celebrity news’

It would be fair to say that the rising tide of celebrity news has not so far been accompanied by a correspondingly rising tide of respect for this domain of journalism. The term ‘celebrity news’ itself is an issue; the term looks like a blatant pitch for legitimacy, and so it is perhaps not surprising that it should be met with some scepticism. Indeed, I can recall that the first time I heard the label ‘celebrity news’ – in relation to the TV program Entertainment Tonight – it seemed risible (just as when I first saw the descriptor ‘a news entertainment’ on the masthead of the British joke tabloid, Sunday Sport, in the late 1990s). At that time, the phrase just seemed hopelessly oxymoronic; indeed, the very fact that such a combination of terms could be proposed seemed destined to devalue the currency of more obviously serious versions of journalism. Over time, however, and as the connection between news and entertainment strengthened across platforms, modes of distribution, and in the generation of content, the ‘celebrity news’ formulation lost much of that early sense of spuriousness. Today we have magazines that present themselves unproblematically as ‘news’ magazines even when all they deal with is celebrity, with perhaps some ‘human interest’ stories thrown in (in Australia, the examples I have in mind are NW – or New Weekly – and Who, which is the Australian version of the top-selling US magazine People). In general, ‘celebrity news’ has settled down now into being a widely used industry descriptor for the reporting and commentary on celebrity. The fact that it is widely used, however, does not alter the fact that it remains a compromised term; for many, celebrity news is still not an entirely respectable branch of journalism. (It should be noted that this is not necessarily a bad thing for those producing it and selling it.) Furthermore, the term effectively masks the fact that some of the practices used to produce celebrity news are very different to those used to produce what is more conventionally described as news. What I would like to do first in this discussion, then, in order to address the question in my title, is to highlight some significant specificities which distinguish the industrial production of news about celebrities from the practices of more traditional forms of journalism.

Producing celebrity news

Perhaps the most significant factor which distinguishes celebrity news from news is that, more than just about any other domain of news with the possible exception of business news, news about celebrities is managed by those who are generating it – that is, by the celebrities themselves, through their personal or organizational promotions and publicity machines. ¹ If the standard, but decreasingly valid, ² version of the production of news has the heroic news journalist fearlessly and independently developing sources in order to seek out information that would otherwise be hidden and which the public needs to know, then celebrity news is probably the direct opposite to this. For a start, news about celebrities is usually generated by those closest to them, and mostly for commercial rather than informational purposes. It is generated via direct contacts with the news organizations; it is most often intended to serve the interests of those at the centre of the story by giving that story as wide a distribution as possible; and it is probably only the public’s level of information about the range of available entertainment choices that is likely to suffer if they don’t have access to the story in question. Notwithstanding, celebrity has now become a fundamental component of the news across all media platforms. In some instances, such as in the tabloid newspapers in the UK and in many online newspaper sites, it is a major component. However, unlike the news that is sought out by the traditional news journalist, unsolicited celebrity news is provided to journalists via press releases, press packs, access to events, through personal contact with the publicity and promotions organizations generating interest in new commercial vehicles (films and television productions, for instance), or through the publicity arm of the celebrity’s own management team. The supply of this material far exceeds the demand; as the size of the publicity and promotions industry has grown, the contemporary journalist is drowning in press releases, event invitations, promotions material and so on. This means that the publicist has to work exceptionally hard on the presentation of their promotional material in order to lift their product out of the pack, while the journalist merely has to select which stories they most want to run with. The promotions industry caters to the journalist’s needs by doing as much as they can to make their story ‘ready to run’; the journalist is required to do very little to make use of it. Strategies include providing tailored video and sample images, as well as taking care that the story is written in a news-compatible form. In a time-poor and highly competitive profession, there is little the journalist can do (indeed, wishes to do) to defend themselves against such strategies. Consequently, rather than acting as an old-fashioned news-gatherer, the celebrity news journalist becomes a filtering agent, sorting out their choices from the plethora on offer but doing as little as possible by way of independent investigation, fact-checking or backgrounding. In this way, the practices on which the celebrity industry is built actually invert the practices on which traditional modes of news journalism have been built.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the journalist’s participation in the media event – the event designed by the ‘smiling professions’ (Hartley, 1992) purely in order to generate media attention (Boorstin, 1971). Celebrity has become the home of the media event, and the journalist is invited along simply to be its witness. If the journalist turns up, if their attention is rewarded, and if they decided to record that publicly in some way, then the media event becomes news and free publicity results. The journalist, of course, is perfectly aware that they are being used as the mechanism for turning advertising into news; they cooperate, however, because they need to ensure they continue to be kept in the loop by the major promotion companies, and accorded the level of access they need to cover their beat properly. The interdependence thus generated – that is, the journalist’s dependence on their sources within the entertainment industries and the entertainment industries’ dependence on the journalist to advertise their products – creates a level of cooperation between the journalist and their sources that is equivalent, ultimately, to what might once have been described as being captured by their sources. While, again, it is worth noting that this is not the only domain of news that is especially subject to this, it may well be the one where the practices such capture would necessarily entail have become the most routinized and embedded. It is hard to imagine another production model which could generate the volume of material now produced by the publicity and promotions industries for circulation through the news media. The scale of the output, the avidity with which it is taken up, and the degree to which it has become institutionally and industrially embedded in the production practices of the news media across all platforms, entitle us to think of this as a significant restructuring of the industrial production of news journalism. In the next section, I want to consider what I would also regard as a distinctive aspect of the production of celebrity news: its dependence on the availability of the image.

The rise of the image

This may not, at first glance, seem like an especially crucial distinguishing feature of the production of celebrity news, but it is true that, more routinely than any other genre of news, celebrity news is driven by the availability of images. Celebrity has its historical origins in the moment when newspapers began to publish images of individuals in the late 19th century, and it is commonplace to talk about this as the moment when the public shifted its interest onto the image of the newsmaker, thereby personalizing and thus complicating our assessments of his or her achievements (and implicating us in what Hartley has called ‘the politics of pictures’ [1992]). While this has been true for quite some time, the two key factors involved in the heightened availability of celebrity images in recent years have been the expansion of the activities of the paparazzi, and the (in some ways related) development of the complex array of fan sites, celebrity news sites, and official celebrity sites, available on the web.

To take the paparazzi first, the development of print media interest in celebrity images that takes off in the mid-1980s, coupled with the relaxation of the standards of what people might expect of such images – the increasing number of naked, ‘candid’ or otherwise unauthorized shots – has expanded the market for the paparazzi shot of the famous person. There are more outlets, more competition, but also a more globalized market for the high profile photo; the financial rewards for selling an image have grown substantially as it is sold on or syndicated around what has become a highly concentrated corporate media environment. Kim McNamara (2011) has published a very useful discussion of the role of the paparazzi in the production of celebrity. McNamara argues that, emerging initially from a context where there had been a significant decline in the print media’s employment of staff photographers, there has been a ‘profound shift in the nature of the paparazzi industry’ in recent years: where once it was largely composed of freelance photographers, she says, ‘selling directly to picture editors at news and entertainment publications’, now the field is ‘dominated by multinational agencies with their own brand of mostly web-based entertainment news’ (2011: 516).

It is commonplace, of course, to regard the paparazzi as a parasitic formation. ‘Paparazzi are fairly despised and are fairly despicable’, says Fred Inglis, but he points out nonetheless that ‘we feed eagerly on the photos’:

When the wolves took off in pursuit of Princess Diana and her driver, slightly drunk, took up the challenge, raced away in the huge black Mercedes, and crashed into the underpass concrete to kill himself, her, and her temporary suitor, the Arab princeling and playboy Dodi Fayed, the gross and deadly photographs fetched a fortune. Not many people looked away. (2010: 265)

Despite the initial disgust at the circumstances of Diana’s death, the tactics used to secure such photographs have not reduced the appeal of the paparazzi’s product: the textual characteristics of a telephoto shot of a famous person living their normal lives unaware of being observed (slightly blurry, often with a series of shots presented to mediate the fact that no one photo on its own has enough interest) have become signifiers of a kind of grubby authenticity – I would suggest because of, rather than in spite of, their clear demonstration that someone’s privacy has been invaded. Where paparazzi photographs might once have been the staple of low prestige or tabloid publications only, they have become mainstream in recent years with the consequence that paparazzi photography has gone from ‘being a street-based job to a technology-driven industry’ (McNamara, 2011: 517), with an increasing orientation towards the distribution platforms provided online. McNamara points to several factors which have contributed to the growing impact of the paparazzi on the mainstream and traditional media. Paparazzi images have played a decisive role in some of the major circulation battles across the print media, their importance in the strategies of competition reflected in the extraordinary prices paid for highly sought-after images (such as candid photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt). The commercial importance of the paparazzi influence also seems to lie in the role it has played in competition across the convergent mediasphere. The fundamental strength of the market demand for images of celebrity across formats and news genres means that they are highly valued by virtually every medium and distribution platform:

The traditional model of paparazzi exploitation of website images of a star is based around a steady stream of low-charge, high-volume sales, with occasional exclusive shots. At a time when advertising spending in traditional media is declining, paparazzi websites are thus trying to boost advertising sales in new media outlets … The economy surrounding a star like Britney Spears encompasses multiple industries such as magazines, newspapers, TV and the web, but feeds ultimately from the paparazzi industry whose pictures are bought to help a story sell. (McNamara, 2011: 518–519)

Paparazzi agencies have become a new kind of news provider, responding to the development of new media sectors by ‘offering a specialist service in breaking celebrity news’ (2011: 523). Their exploitation of the online environment, McNamara argues, has only enhanced their importance:

The Internet has broadened and ‘elasticized’ access to, and flows of, celebrity images (Marshall, 2007). Paparazzi agencies bring audiences the images of celebrities, but it is the increasingly sophisticated technology – mobile phones, MP3 players, BlackBerrys – which allow the viewer to access images and information in new ways. Thus, the significance of paparazzi agency entertainment websites lies not only in the simultaneity of their production of fan-oriented content, and outsourcing to other news and entertainment agencies, but also in the web’s speed and ability to reach a mass audience. (2011: 522)

The decision of the paparazzi agencies to go online and develop their own web presence has contributed greatly to the amount of images in ready circulation, as Marshall (2006) says. However, a further factor in this – and still a relatively new one in the history of celebrity – is the decision of many celebrities to cut out the middle man entirely and represent (or perhaps more accurately to perform) themselves directly to their audiences through celebrity websites. ‘Official’ celebrity websites can involve anything from the posting of the standard press releases and publicity shots to more frank and perhaps even genuine discussions of the celebrity’s own thoughts and personal life. High profile celebrities who have been known to use these sites to communicate directly with their fans in this way include Beyonce, Pamela Anderson and Mariah Carey. Such use of these sites has the capacity to significantly change the nature of the relationship between the fan and the celebrity; indeed, Marshall (2006: 640) suggests in some areas (popular music and sport are the ones he nominates) it is becoming an expected element of the fan–celebrity’s parasocial relationship. Certainly, it is becoming an increasingly common strategy for the individual celebrity to employ as a means of bypassing both the promotions industry and the news media – at least in the first instance, since of course whatever is said on these sites is thus fair game for the evening news (and sometimes a serious problem to be addressed by the publicist).

Then, there are, of course, the amateurs – the bloggers, the passersby with the mobile phone, or what have been called the ‘citizen paparazzi’ (appropriating, of course, the implications of a pro-social politics associated with the notion of ‘citizen journalism’). Not only has the ordinary person taken to populating the web with images located on their personal blogs or on fan sites, but amateur photographers have managed to get their material into the commercial media as well. While there are still some industrial firewalls limiting access to some of the print media, those media platforms which depend more vitally on immediacy have been keen to take up images produced by amateurs with their mobile phones. The low-resolution aesthetic of the professional paparazzi photograph I referred to earlier actually assists these citizen photographers because it blurs the distinction between what a professional and what an amateur image looks like, and thus removes some of the barriers to participation in a market that is consequently more open now than ever before. The use of citizen paparazzi or ordinary people to provide both images and story content is now common in celebrity websites such as TMZ and in its TV version. Ordinary people can also act as scouts, alerting TMZ to the location of likely targets (most notoriously, Britney Spears), so that the TMZ stringers with their digital cameras can head for the vision.

Finally, on this issue of the massive expansion in the trade in and the availability of the image, there are, of course, hundreds of thousands of both commercial and DIY websites and blogs devoted to celebrities and while many of them will contain comments and chat, a great many of them are simply offering pictures: screen shots from movies, publicity stills, ‘candid’ shots, and so on. There are also websites which specialize in what one calls ‘celebrity skin’ – naked or near naked shots of female celebrities. While we might not have much respect for these, they do constitute the gene pool for some of what eventually makes it onto more respectable news sites. Some of these naked shots will migrate into mainstream journalism, appropriately pixelated or otherwise censored, if they can be connected to a story. And it should be said that this genre existed well before the internet (there was a magazine, for instance, called Celebrity Skin, which had been around for years), but the internet increased the ease with which this material could be accessed as well as providing the capacities for copying, sharing and networking; the result is a dramatic expansion of this kind of activity around celebrity over the last decade or so.

Gossip as news

A further factor which distinguishes celebrity news from more traditional news is its attenuated relationship with fact. Celebrity news reporters establish their credibility by way of demonstrating the quality of their access to the sources of celebrity news, rather than by their capacity to deliver verifiable, evidence-based reports. Two things emerge from this. One is that celebrity news shares with some other genres of news – politics, and sport, for instance – the characteristic that selected journalists become known as expert commentators, and that this role has become particularly identified with this category of news. Just as television news programs will have their report from the day’s doings in Parliament or Capitol Hill, in which a specialist political correspondent will provide comment and analysis, so, too, breakfast or morning magazine programs will have their specialist report from LA or London, previewing the latest productions from the entertainment industry while also relaying the latest gossip and rumour about high profile celebrities. Just as in the coverage of politics, much of this reporting is openly speculative and virtually free of any requirement to provide supporting evidence – indeed it is the acknowledged freedom from the rules of evidence that makes the speculation both possible and interesting. The second thing is that, unlike reporters bound by more traditional notions of objectivity and independence, the presentation of celebrity journalism will readily foreground the friendly personal relation between the journalist and their subject; it is almost required that the successful celebrity journalist directly invokes an off-screen familiarity with the celebrity being interviewed. This not only provides a frame for the interaction between the two, but it seems necessary as a means of authorizing the celebrity commentator’s observations and speculations. Again, this precisely inverts the conventional relationship constructed between the journalist and their sources.

The establishment of such a discursive regime around the presentation of celebrity news reflects the media’s progressive, if implicit, tolerance for a redefinition of what it might regard as news. Celebrity is not the only area where this is happening (again, sport, politics and, less obviously, business news are places where there is also quite a bit of tolerance for this), but celebrity is probably the key area where we can see consumers unproblematically accepting gossip or rumour as news. Of course, to some extent this has always been the case – the role of gossip in what used to be called the social pages, and the role of the gossip columnist, have a long history (see, for instance, Gabler, 1995). I would argue that role was, however, quarantined rather than pervasive: that is, gossip was confined to the relevant column or section of the paper, rather than being the front page story (as it can be now). Nonetheless, not to give too categoric an account of change, it is certainly true that the celebrity commentator of today and the gossip columnist of that earlier formation do share a number of attributes. For instance, it is their acknowledged distance from the facticity of news that actually makes what they do possible: no one is going to call them to account for making a wrong call because ‘getting it right’ is not the point in this domain of news. It is the performance of the speculation, which invites a response – of further speculation – from the audience, that is the point. This, then, is a cooperative venture, a pleasurable collaborative fiction in which the audience is as much implicated as the journalist. Celebrity is a special regime of news in which reporting of gossip, rumour, and speculation is judged not in terms of its accuracy, but in terms of its demonstration of the commentator’s access to otherwise unavailable stories (even when these may wind up simply as unsubstantiated rumours). There is the appeal of what looks like an ‘insider’s’ perspective here, of course, but there is also a less generous dimension in the continual promise of the ‘gotcha’ moment. Audiences take pleasure from uncovering the secrets of public figures – because it is possible rather than because there is any presumption of hypocrisy or venality being exposed. Satisfying the demand for such moments may be harmless much of the time, but at its most irresponsible – as routinely used by outlets such as TMZ or the worst of the British tabloids, for instance – it amounts to an exploitation of media power.

In itself, perhaps, this may not constitute a sea change for journalism, since, as I say, it is really only a modulation of the long-standing tactics of the gossip columnist. However, it might help to indicate why I am not convinced of this to describe a video segment that appeared on the website of the national daily newspaper, The Australian, some months ago. As part of a discussion of the universities’ contribution to journalism training (something the paper had been pushing for a while in order to challenge the notion that a university degree might contribute to the production of improved journalism), the editor of The Australian’s Higher Education Supplement, Julie Hare, was joined by the editor of the Media section of the paper. Since there had been much discussion in the newspaper about what was needed to train a good journalist, Hare asked her colleague what he saw as the fundamental motivating principle behind his own engagement in journalism. His response: ‘Well, we all love gossip, don’t we?’ Hare seemed a little taken aback by such a callow attitude but did not contest it. The exchange certainly demonstrated why The Australian might believe that a university education is unnecessary for such a task. However, it also raises questions about whether celebrity journalism is alone in driving a significant redefinition of what journalism does. Of course, from time to time we are subjected to a lot of self-serving nonsense in the mainstream media as they are forced to rediscover the democratic function of journalism. Typically, such a discovery gets trotted out when individual news organizations need to defend their industrial or commercial interests: in the UK, the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking is only the most recent provocation for this kind of thing. In Australia, a government inquiry which proposed establishing an effective media regulator with oversight over all media platforms generated hysterical reactions from the media: there must have been many consumers who were a little bemused to find that their favourite news outlet had suddenly claimed to be playing a hitherto undetectable role in the delivery of democracy by disinterestedly informing the public. As the media move more towards the role of providing entertainment rather than information (Turner, 2010) – which is what the tabloid newspapers, Fox News, and Entertainment Tonight all do – and as serious attention to the more old-fashioned news formats such as political current affairs declines, then celebrity news may well turn out to have played a significant role in displacing the population’s interest in traditional forms of news (Couldry et al., 2007). But celebrity news won’t have done this alone.

Conclusion

The answer to the question in my title, then, is ‘yes, but not the news as we used to know it’. The lower status accorded to celebrity news has to do with its compromised relation to more independent and traditional versions of news, and its implication in some of the changes that are occurring in how the news is understood as a cultural and informational form. Celebrity news is both a product and an appropriation of news journalism which largely serves the interests of those with an industrial stake in publicizing (the) celebrity. It has adopted a number of the practices and discourses of news, and it has successfully colonized parts (or all) of many of the sites and platforms once occupied by other versions of the news. Of course, it needs to be acknowledged that celebrity news satisfies many of the same cultural demands as news – with gossip an overlapping factor – but I am suggesting that it serves very different functions in terms of informing the citizenry to those traditionally attributed to journalism. It has its own particular system of industrial production which is tightly articulated to the needs of the entertainment industries. Not to be too precious about it, of course, traditional journalism is itself far from pure; there are many periods in its history when it has addressed the entertainment needs of the population as a foremost consideration. The rise of the muckraking newspaper in the USA at the turn of the 19th century, and the rise of the British tabloid over the 1970s and 1980s, are among the moments when journalism has sought to satisfy a particular market with sensational stories whose relation to an objective truth is supported by the use of the discourses of journalism rather than by the mobilization of evidence. Celebrity journalism is far from the first to treat news as a means of entertaining its audience. It may, however, be the first genre of news to see that as, in effect, its sole objective.