What’s the point of being a showbiz reporter in 2023?

I’m STUMPED, Kids. It’s not what it was…

Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

The straw that broke the camel’s back at the end of my columnist years came when I filed a 1200-word interview with pop superstar Gwen Stefani via my reporter at the time, Natalie Edwards.

I’d been in LA and Natalie was in London and got an exclusive sit-down with the No Doubt singer. She’d gotten a great chat about Gwen’s solo career, getting back on the road after being a mum and lots of fun anecdotes. I was jealous I hadn’t done it myself having met her in Glastonbury many moons before. Gwen was the real deal.

The chat Natalie had garnered with Gwen was cut down to just 120 words and instead of being the lead my column (and the front page) had a complete wipeout on Chantelle Houghton from Big Brother and her latest weight and marriage issues.

I think Chantelle was jogging on the beach in set-up pap shots (natch) 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 vividly remember a switch changing. I quit the day I got back from that overseas trip to Los Angeles with the perplexed editor telling me ‘I’d done a great job’.

I was like: “Thanks, here’s my letter of resignation.” Cool, calm and collected – I was done. Enough.

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.

ABOVE: Looking like a yeti with Gwen in 2001 (I think) when No Doubt performed at Glastonbury.

This leads me to starting a conversation – what’s the point of a showbiz journalist in 2023? Let’s discuss.

Firstly allow me to explain how it all started for me writing. I didn’t have aspirations to become a journalist. Not one iota. From a very young age I just had a need to work and a need to earn – I wasn’t bothered about University in the slightest.

To me, University just seemed like an excuse to prolong being a youth and continuing an education for the sake of drinking and partying. To be frank, everyone seemed to be picking courses I deemed would have zero use to their actual lives after they left. So why have the ridiculous amounts of debt? I wanted to get out there and earn. I’m your typical grafter and always have been.

There’s no question, I was transfixed by the razzle dazzle of celebrity and all things red carpet. I adored the glamour, the adoration and the buzz of it all. In those formative years of Kylie and Jason fever in rough-round-the-edges Hanworth, South West London, where I grew up I managed to keep on top of the showbiz world via Smash Hits and then eventually Heat and all the tabloids which were jam packed with celebrity news and gossip.

Back then, celebrity had a completely different landscape to what it is today. The way we celebrate and admire our celebrities has changed ten-fold to where it is today. Mainly because of social media and the speed at which celebrity news breaks, is devoured and thrown on the tip within a nanosecond here in 2023.

Back in ye olde days of the late nineties through to the mid noughties, 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. You know – singer, actor, presenter etc…just the obvious celebrity careers.

This was a day and age I had so much more respect for.

ABOVE: With Mariah backstage at Top of the Pops - Dreamlover dayssss….

As you know, I’d started at the Mirror with Piers Morgan at the helm in 2000 on work experience and by 2001 I was staff. Shortly after I went to The People (LOLZ), then it was to Loaded, followed by a large stint at Closer magazine and finally ended up having my own column at the Sunday Mirror. I dipped my toe into pretty much every side of the showbiz journalism industry as a freelancer too following my time at the Sunday Mirror.

I did the red carpets, travelled the world to events, interviewed pretty much every star I’d ever wanted too and developed a good reputation as a decent person to deal with across the industry. I wasn’t keen on being a twat and picking fights with people. I was probably too soft to do the job – but I could always find a joke…and a laugh. I wanted my column to be entertainment and fun first and foremost – and breaking some good stories along the way.

So why did I leave when I was having so much success and fun? 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. I’m sick in my mouth to this day when somebody says their main occupation is an influencer (that’s just me, Kids).

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 2022. I truly believe without the continual scrolling of Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok and all the other platforms our lives would be better.

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 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? I can’t.

Hell, I’ll go as far to say the entire journalism (and PR) industry is dying a quick death due to social media. 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 little journalist to write a profile about some star and include the obligatory 10 paragraphs of quotes?

In ye olde days there would be a journalist like myself 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 my work.

ABOVE: With Cheryl Tweedy many moons ago with the sweatiest armpits known to man ;-)

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. And what their agenda is going to be is the choice they make.

Let us not forget also; in the early noughties the journalists fully held the ‘power’ to make or break somebody, now it’s the public that have all the power when it comes to celebrities and whether their projects are a success (as we discussed last week). 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 totally fucking irrelevant aside from writing nibs from press releases or round tables and what happened on social media the night before. There’s no fun left in the celebrity journalism these days. There’s rarely any ‘real’ contact with ‘proper’ celebrities these days.

I genuinely left my job at the Sunday Mirror in 2013 because it got to the point where I was being told two things. Firstly - as I explained last week - the editors were writing the headlines to my interviews BEFORE I’d even gone out to do the interview itself which was fucking ridiculous.

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 – hilariously women-hating women editors too - were septic and 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.

Within the next seven years – as I built my PR company Beak Communications and watched the world of social media explode – I couldn’t have been happier with my choice. The industry had changed and social media had grabbed it’s victim, dug its claws in and gone for the jugular. I cannot begin to imagine being a young enthusiastic twenty-something ‘showbiz reporter’ working at an online outlet nowadays who has to sit there bashing out 14 stories a day for their shift to be valid. It must be soul destroying. And that’s before you see the amount of mistakes they make ;-)

I genuinely wouldn’t recommend anybody came into the journalism industry wanting to be a showbiz reporter. It’s a thankless dull task right now. It’s also only a matter of time before publications properly close. The paper quality is on the turn, all the good guys are being ditched and there’s an abundance of the ‘old school’ writers choosing new career paths.

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.

So there you have it – Mr Showbiz is dead and buried and generally isn’t ‘showbiz’ dead too for fledgling entertainment journalists? I think so.

SURE, ‘celebrity’ will never die. I still get excited for award’s season. But the way in which celebrity journalism is written now has lost any of its power. It’s just a lot of opinion, comment and observation.

I’m pleased I was there in what I deem to be – for good or for worse - the golden age of celebrity in those journalism years.

Next week…we are going to discuss the future of PR. And how fucked that is too! JOYFUL JOYFUL!

Until next week, Kids.

ABOVE: With Sienna way back when…I cannot confirm or deny if we used the same colourist…