Is celebrity gossip REALLY dead?

Julie Burchill wrote for the Spectator about whether the likes of Heat and Popbitch have finally had their day. But have they? Let’s deep dive.

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Last week I read an article with bated breath when everyone’s favourite controversial, and often offensive, journalist Julie Burchill wrote about the showbiz gossip world.

I’ve often wanted to tackle this subject. In my own private writing, I’ve had a ‘chapter’ on my computer for years which had the headline “Celebrity is dead”. So, I went back through the piece I wrote and then read hers.

Now, sure, legendary scribe Julie has a point. Obviously, the glory days of celebrity magazines and gossip columns have dispersed and changed vastly. They don’t hold any power these days and they don’t lead the showbiz agenda like they once did. In fact, they’re mostly sad and dull insights into the celebrity world. Picture captions accompanied by questionable source quotes. No sass. No game-changing exclusives.

Then with the newspapers, Reach PLC have pretty much cancelled the celebrity gossip pages which saddens me having come from the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror. Back then the gossip columns I worked across (3am, Sean O’Brien’s column, Suzanne Kerin’s Radar spread and my own column) were very much the ham in an otherwise dull white bread sandwich.

With the mags, they’re all printed on wafer-thin paper and once you’ve read one, you’re pretty much resigned to the fact celebrity weekly magazines are living on the cusp of mass closure. It’s a matter of time before most of them close. Or will they ALL close? Maybe. I hope a couple of them survive but it feels like they’re mostly living on borrowed time.

We’ve lost tens of titles over the past few years. Star, Now, Reveal, Look have all gone. Amazingly New! continues to be printed but it just has off cuts from OK! – which isn’t what it once was offering tiny fees for reality stars to reveal their private lives and take part in shoots. Back in ye olde days they paid up to a MILLION quid for a huge celebrity wedding. Crazy days.

There are little glimmers of hope out there in the magazine world. Grazia still has excellent covers and great long reads. Hello! Magazine has experienced a satisfying-to-the-eye rebirth of late under new editorship and have experienced success with their stand-alone issues (LOVED their London issue recently). I love the teams at both these titles and I’m right behind them.

It’s not just the UK magazine industry that is suffering either; in the US the magazine world has changed tenfold. Once HUGE sellers - In Touch, Life & Style, Closer and First for Women – all close their doors at the end of June. Entertainment Weekly and InStyle also recently closed. Even O, The Oprah Magazine stopped printing in 2020 and Marie Claire ended its print run in 2021. Amazingly, US Weekly is experiencing somewhat of a rebirth with UK journalist Dan Wakeford – who was among several people who gave me work when I was starting out in 2000 - working his magic once more at the helm. It looks great and is approaching celebrity in a far friendlier manner to work with talent and keep the gossip more upbeat and positive.

The likes of Perez Hilton and Just Jared don’t hold any clout online now. It’s just picture captions as people don’t care for a long read these days. Then in general everybody realises just how poisonous TMZ are with how they approach celebrity news. Thank God.

In Julie’s piece she reflects on Heat Magazine and the Mark Frith years. Sure, they were epic times in magazine journalism to live through, and he did a great job. If you went on holiday, you were almost certain to buy yourself a copy of Heat. I would even buy it when I was working at Closer (which was based just next door on the same floor on Shaftesbury Avenue) – truth is, it was much more fun to read. Especially on a plane with a Gin and Tonic. It was such a staple of the noughties, and it reminded me of when I was young, and I’d religiously buy Smash Hits.

The joy I’d get from heading to my local newsagent to buy that magazine each week in my tens and teens was insane. It was like the bible for me. Worth noting Frith edited that too before my pal Kate Thornton took over.

Unfortunately, it appears mostly that Julie has forgotten the fact the magazine industry isn’t anything like it once was. It’s tired and Heat doesn’t deliver and feed like it used too – and it hasn’t done for maybe a decade. If I was in hospital like she was I’d stick to Grazia or Hello! for sure. Possibly a strange choice for Julie to think Heat would still be as fruity and frivolous as it once was. BTW – you can read her piece on the Spectator in full HERE.

MEANWHILE…here are some more thoughts about why showbiz gossip could well be dead. From the personal diaries of yester year – which I’ve spent some time updating for 2025.

Sometimes I think I accidentally fell into the showbiz world. I was growing up in those formative years of Madonna, Jacko, Take That and Kylie and Jason. Boybands, girlbands and the birth of real celebrity and mass-market hysteria.

In the late eighties, celebrity was a completely different landscape to what it is today.

The way we celebrated and admired celebrities was so different. For a start, talent was a real requirement if you were to get ahead and become a household name. Whether you were a singer, a dancer, performer, presenter, actor or director – there was always an occupation for a celebrity to fill out on their passport form. It was a day and age I had so much more respect for…

If it wasn’t for the gossip columns and the weekly glossy celebrity magazines, I doubt I would have made it into the industry – I was obsessed with them all. I didn’t have a phone to scroll on back then. I started at the Mirror with Piers Morgan at the helm, went to the People, then Loaded, had a large stint at Closer magazine and finally ended up having my own column at the Sunday Mirror. I’d dipped my toe into pretty much every side of the showbiz journalism industry. I did the red carpets, travelled the world to events, interviewed pretty much every star I’d ever wanted too and developed a reputation for being a decent person to deal with across the industry.

So why did I leave when I was having so much success? It was two things – the rise of reality television and social media and the fact people stopped having that all-important occupation to fill out in the passport office.

There’s no denying, social media has become the Japanese Knotweed of the celebrity world. In fact, it’s going a long way to poisoning every aspect of life as we see it here in 2025. I truly believe without Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok (and all the other platforms) our lives would be so much better. On every level. It’s not rockets science. We are all addicted to technology, screens and scrolling. I hate the fact I’ve been sucked in like I have. My screen time is over 6 hours a day. I don’t have time to read a magazine even if I wanted too.

Our mental health would be thriving instead of nose diving, our anxiety levels would be half of what they are currently, and the celebrity world would be far superior and taken far more seriously than it is today.

In my opinion, the value of a celebrity interview has never been lower. Can you name the last celebrity interview or profile you’ve read that had any gravitas? Maybe the Johnny Depp Rolling Stone profile for me…but there are very little other options. So many newsrooms are being merged across the global offices. I read Vanity Fair last week and it was beyond dull. I used to live for that title.

People want their news quick smart from a feed. They don’t care for the interview that accompanies the announcement or what a journalist wants to do to portray that celebrity in the true light. The public has direct access to the celebrity they’re following and relies on them to speak, ‘announce’ and say when they have an opinion to make through their feeds or it’s all about what they share on social. Also, social media is FREE. So why pay for some snidey usually female journalist to write a profile about a celebrity and include the obligatory 10 paragraphs of quotes about their new project.

In ye olde days there would be a journalist like me doing interview after interview with the celebrities to gather all the information and I’d print said interviews that Sunday which in turn would set an agenda for tonnes of ‘follow ups’ in the dailies and you’d see the ripple effect of your work.

Right now, celebrity interviews are rarely worth bothering with. Nobody cares what Simon Cowell thinks anymore. Nobody wants to read about the female of the day like Cheryl Cole. Stars like Beyonce or Adele don’t even bother with more than a trio of interviews to launch an album or a tour. It’s simply not worth the bother for them. They can post everything across social media and have direct access to their engaged audience – and the journalists follow up what they post anyhow. Whereas in the early noughties the journalists held the power, now it’s the general public that have all the power when it comes to celebrities and whether their projects are a success. They decide if a venture is cool. They decide is an album is a return to form. They decide who is going to become the notorious star of the decade. They also – rather worryingly - decide who to cancel – never forget cancel culture is another of the general public’s strongest tactics.

Showbiz columnists are irrelevant. I genuinely left my job because it got to the point where I was being told two things. Firstly, the editors were writing the headlines or the stories to my interviews BEFORE I’d even gone out to do the interview itself which to be frank was fucking ridiculous. If it was Cheryl or Dannii they wanted stress and weight issues to be covered, and I’d return with the headline literally written and they’d dig through my transcript to make it work from what I achieved. If it was Posh, it would always be about her weight, the kids or David’s supposed infidelities. Secondly, I still believed in the talent aspect of yester-year, and I couldn’t continue to be forced to write picture captions about Cheryl Cole with some mean slant or about what one of the Kardashian family had posted on Twitter the night before. It wasn’t reporting. It was fucking stupid and very negative. The editors were mean but rather extraordinarily they didn’t see that. They were quite simply delusional about their morals, and they didn’t care whether they damaged or ruined lives. They just cared about sales.

The final straw in my Sunday Mirror column was when I filed a 1200-word interview from a work trip to LA with Gwen Stefani from No Doubt about her career, getting back on the road and being a mum and it was cut down to 80 words and instead my column (and the front page) had a wipeout on Chantelle Houghton from Big Brother and her latest weight and marriage issues. I think she was jogging on the beach in set-up pap shots and banging on about her weight gain from a relationship. Showbiz had well and truly become a load of bollocks – and it still is…

I literally quit the day I got back when the editor told me I’d done a great job in Los Angeles on a work trip. I was like: “Thanks, here’s my letter of resignation.”

I had no job to go too. I had nothing in the pipeline. I just knew my morals and dignity couldn’t continue to deal with daft editors who didn’t get showbiz. Sure, I guess in a way they were right – Chantelle Houghton would probably sell a paper far more than Gwen Stefani would. But I didn’t want to dick around in that world. The celebrity reporter game had truly become a moronic job for anybody to take on.

Across the next decade – as I built my PR company Beak Communications and watched the world of social media explode into monstrous sizes – I couldn’t have been happier with my choice. The industry had changed, and social media had grabbed its victim, dug its claws in and gone for the jugular.

I cannot begin to imagine being a twenty-something showbiz reporter sat there bashing out 14 stories a day for their shift to be valid. I genuinely wouldn’t recommend anybody came into the journalism industry wanting to be a showbiz reporter right now. It makes me sad really to be in a position where I wouldn’t advise somebody to enter the industry I’ve loved so much. But it’s only a matter of time before publications properly close.

How would I recommend you pick up your celebrity insights and gossip these days? Podcasts. That’s where. Not the cheesy generic ones. The ones that take a deep dive into the lives of the celebrity. The ones that get under the skin of their guests. I could genuinely listen to Scott Feinberg’s Hollywood Reporter Awards Chatter podcast every day and never get bored. Because it reminds me very much of the way we used to handle interviews in the showbiz world. It’s fascinating.

With Instagram and the way in which celebrities have the power of portraying themselves how they wish it’s mostly a pointless exercise to follow somebody you admire hoping their account will give you a true depiction. It’s probably controlled by their staff. They probably edit all the images to make themselves look and sound better. It’s contrived, worked on and all about their brand. Many people on social media earn their entire living from their daily posts. With very few exceptions. If you’re going to go into social media admiring somebody then PLEASE open your eyes.

And if you’re like me and have loved Madonna for decades then please don’t follow her. It’s heartbreaking to see her screeching ‘look at me’ daily as she tries to grope herself for attention. The daily damage she commits to her iconic name and career is tragic.

So, there you have it – showbiz gossip is pretty much dead. Well, it will never die. But the way in which celebrity journalism is written has definitely lost all of its power.