Celebrity journalism is dead — let it go

Looks like we know when “celebrity journalism” finally died — it was just last Saturday. With a Sydney Morning Herald page-one puff piece headlined “I found my princess: Rebel Wilson’s new girlfriend”, Australia’s oldest masthead marked the genre’s passing.

Now it threatens to bring the Herald crashing down with it, as the venerable masthead is struggling to get out from under the falling dead weight of gossip reporting while it still can.

It’s quickly become the best-known story in Australian journalism, shocking even the Daily Mail. SMH “Private Sydney” columnist Andrew Hornery, reckoning he had enough intel to report that actress Rebel Wilson’s new partner was a woman, emailed her for confirmation/comment. Wilson (or her team) shanked his “exclusive” with her own coming-out on Instagram. Hornery grumbling in his column about being scooped on the outing led to a social media kicking, which prompted the Herald‘s editor, Bevan Shields, to weigh in with a “really, folks, nothing to see here” explainer.

Predictably, this led to a further kicking (much of it now aimed at Shields) — as well as a withdrawal and apology by Hornery on Monday. All good fun, really. But by touching the hot plate of gossip, the masthead brought the celebrity genre tumbling around it.

“Celebrity journalism” sounds almost respectable. But let’s be honest: it’s a 1980s rebrand of gossip, a fancy-schmancy phrasing to justify bringing the private lives of public people into the columns of once-serious publications.

It took the emerging craft of in-depth personality profiles out of 1960s US magazines, reshaped by New Journalism’s adaptation of the literary show-don’t-tell techniques, and meshed it with the spreading gossip of personal factoids about a new class of celebrities out of the London and New York tabloids.

The comfort journalists give one another is that these private facts are a way of reporting important social trends with the solidity of actual events: relationship breakdowns, boys behaving badly, an eye-rolling touch of “these kids today”. 

And anyway, journalists assure themselves: they’re celebrities! They want publicity. Need it, even. Really, we’re doing them a favour! (Famously, Donald Trump built his celebrity status in the 1980s through judicious leaks to the notorious “Page Six” column in Murdoch’s New York Post. How did that work out?)

Maybe it was that way once. Now social media gives celebrities (and you or me, for that matter) the channel to build their own image. It’s shifted the balance between writer and subject.

Celebrities talk directly to their base. Tipping the balance, fans and supporters turn social media against journalists and gossip media. Networks of, say, Korean pop fans are taking this a step further. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, they crashed the Dallas Police Department when it called for snitch videos of protesters and then flooded the racist #whitelivesmatter with videos by K-pop powerhouse BTS.

Gossip’s reach has long been powered by sex. The Herald’s mistake lay in missing the big takeaway from the past decade: the LGBTQIA+ community isn’t playing along.

Perhaps the paper should have learned a lesson from Gawker. After the gossip site reported on the sexuality of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, he bankrolled a defamation case over a separate story about a sex tape of wrestler Hulk Hogan, which bankrupted the publisher.

The Herald stressed that outing Wilson was the last thing on its mind — “simply asking questions”, Shields assured readers. Social media wasn’t having it.

Nor were other journalists: The ABC’s Patricia Karvelas tweeted: “I have said that I don’t believe in outing — that I think it’s dangerous.” SBS’s Anton Enus responded to Shields’ note: “A little disingenuous if you ask me. If her new partner had been a man there would be no element of coming out. A key difference casually ignored.”

Internally, the paper’s staff joined in, saying the masthead’s reputation is being trashed in an internal note.

Papers like the Herald are trapped. It built its capacity for celebrity journalism to compete with the News Corp tabloids because it seemed that’s what people wanted to read. Sure, people will read it, but will they pay? Worse, it seems it provokes readers into cancelling subscriptions.

The Herald (like The Age) could learn a few lessons from the recent electoral teal uprising in the suburbs that form the core of their readership. The independent vote demonstrated a demand for a new, more humane politics.

Now, the pushback against “celebrity journalism” from the same audience demonstrates a demand for a new, more humane journalism. That’s good news.