The Evolving Role of Journalism in the Social Media Age

Senior Thesis

Since the day that Trump rode down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency, the media hasn’t known what to do with him. Trump’s relationship with the news organizations has been tumultuous at best and he's been extremely vocal about his dislike of journalists. On May 28 of this year he tweeted, “Don't believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign. The only quote that matters is a quote from me!” Trump has made it abundantly clear that he does not need the media to spread his message — he has social media. And yet, the news networks devoted endless hours of their time to covering Trump and his campaign. The Tyndall Report, which tracks broadcast news networks, reported that from Jan. 1, 2016 until Labor Day, Trump logged 822 minutes of media coverage on ABC, NBC and CBS. Clinton’s campaign got 386 minutes of media coverage (Farhi). Shedding some light on why the media was so entranced by Trump, Les Moonves, chairman of CBS said that while Trump is bad for America, he is good for CBS, "The money's rolling in and this is fun," Moonves went on. "I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going, ” (Collins).  It’s true, Trump is great for ratings, he always has been. From the various incarnations of his reality show to his frequent appearances on Howard Stern, and his cameos in TV and movies, it is clear that Trump understands how to keep people interested in him.

As part of a series from The New Yorker called “Trump and the Truth,” writer Margaret Talbot examined Trump’s strange relationship with journalists.  “Early on in his campaign, Trump’s press strategy looked like an attempt to re-create the cozy relationship he cultivated, in the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and nineties, with the New York tabloids, who had loved him for his excess and his accessibility. He kept them up to date on all his doings, and they kept him in boldface.” As a celebrity looking for press, accessibility and a entertaining story are all you need, which is why as Talbot explains, Trump the celebrity loved the media, “But that was back when he was a brassy, vulgar, and mendacious real-estate mogul. For a brassy, vulgar, and mendacious Presidential candidate, the rules are different, and he’s made it clear he doesn’t like them. Trump nakedly wants what maybe all politicians want, but few have the temerity to ask for: plenty of attention, all of it admiring.” When Trump didn't receive that attention, he took to Twitter, and like many celebrities before him, gave the public a front seat to watch the inner workings of his mind, and the public and the media couldn't look away.  

Journalism's role in society is predicated on the power to be the gatekeeper of information and what is considered news, but social media is chipping away at that power. Since the 1890 when the first newspapers began to circulate across the country, journalism decided what people needed to know and who mattered. In turn readers bought newspapers and theoretically became more informed citizens. Around the same time, journalism specifically focused on the private lives of normal people and celebrities became increasingly popular with the people buying papers, but it was highly controversial. In her book "Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines," Andrea McDonnell describes the reasons why celebrity journalism is looked down upon. She suggests that with the popularization of the private, came skepticism from the public who saw the private sphere as distinctly feminine, and therefore not serious enough be a part of journalism (McDonnell 11).  People immediately people began questioning celebrity journalism and saw it as something different than journalism. Because of this celebrity journalism and journalism split in different directions, one clinging to its role as a gatekeeper, and the other simply giving the people what they wanted — a look into a constructed reality that offered glamour, scandal and intimacy. This paper will explore this divide and attempt to historicize it, while also unpacking what we can learn from the popularity of celebrity journalism.  

I argue that by looking at the history of celebrity journalism and its popularity, we can see that fundamental problem with journalism as a field is that it consistently ignores the reader —  instead of creating content based on what their readers want to read, journalism is based on deciding what the readers need to read. This inability to empathize with readers has become a fatal flaw in the face of social media because as a medium, social media has given the gatekeeping power to the people and is based on producing content that is exciting to the public. Through my research into the relationship between journalism and celebrity journalism, I wanted to understand why it is that celebrity journalism continues to successfully adapt to new forms of technology while and the rest of the field has alienated readers and lost its way.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back to the early days of celebrity and of celebrity journalism. Celebrity journalism began developing as a field in the late 1880s and 1890s when journalists were given the power to make people famous just be writing about them.  

In 1885, journalists established their role in the production of celebrity because of the rise in popularity of wire services and newspaper chains which gave the media the power to reach a much larger audience. In his history of celebrity journalism, Charles Ponce de Leon points out that “One of the most remarkable traits of the mass-circulation press was its ability to make ordinary people visible at a time when urban growth appeared to be submerging individuals into an anonymous mass.”  (Ponce de Leon 81). Suddenly everyone in the country had access to the same news. As a result the public went from being just a small town in the United States to the whole country. This made it incredibly easy for random people to become not just local, but national celebrities.

More and more people were living in cities all over the country which lead to the creation of more newspapers and magazines to reach the growing population — sometimes up to 12 per city (Ponce de Leon 81). To keep up with competition, individual newspapers had to figure out how to get people to buy their papers.  These newspapers were both readily available and cheap, which made them the standard way of reaching the public. Due to the amount of competition, newspapers and magazines needed to create content that would spark people's interests.  Celebrity journalism was founded on the idea that “names make news” and that readers cared about people, celebrities and all aspects of their lives, while the rest of the field functioned on the idea that the public has "a right to know" and being informed was an essential part of being a citizen (Ponce de Leon 44). Hard news didn't have to entertain, it had to inform, but celebrity news thrived on narrative. The first attempts at this new type of "human-interest journalism," were basically tame gossip columns which focused on marriages, deaths, speeches and events.  The New York Herald had a column called "Movements of Distinguished People," while The New York World had "Among the Players," a column about Broadway stars, "People Often Talked About,” and "Doings of Women Folk," about women in social clubs. These columns were a hit with the public and magazine editors noticed. They started to write longer profiles about people and their personal lives, their habits, and what they like to do (Ponce de Leon 52). Papers started experimenting with interviewing and photographing subjects, both of which became popular around  the turn of the century.

The convoluted relationship between celebrity and journalism was truly forged in the 1920s when celebrity journalism came into its own and developed a recognizable style. This time period essentially lays the groundwork for the kind of celebrity journalism we read today, and develops the formula for writing these kinds of profiles was perfected. This style was based on creating the illusion of an intimate relationship between the reader and the celebrity. The articles produced at this time made readers feel like they were "in the know," and getting a look into a world they didn't have access to. Crucially, the journalists were the key to this access.

The New York Times’s Sunday magazine for example, profiled Babe Ruth in June of 1928 and the profile paints Ruth as a normal guy who happened to become a celebrity and has a real life that journalists can share with readers. This is something that gives readers the illusion that they too could become a celebrity. The profile begins saying, “George Herman Ruth has no private life to speak of. Anyone who has seen the behemothian Babe readily realizes that his is not a figure early overlooked.” Naturally, the next paragraph goes on to tell the reader that even though Ruth appears to be a totally public figure, there is in fact more than meets the eye and they journalist is about to share these private details with the reader, “Yet there are many sides to the babbling Babe which event those who pay a dollar-ten to get into the Yankee Stadium are unable to see with the naked eye from the vantage of point of a grandstand seat.” The profile describes in detail how Ruth exits Yankee Stadium to avoid the mob of people interested in seeing him or in getting an autograph. “He uses a secret passage, first peaking out to see that no one is watching and then making a wild dash for his car, which is parked at the curb, guarded by a policeman.” After divulging this secret, the journalist goes on to talk about what Ruth does in his free time — plays golf, saxophone, poker and pinochle. He describes Ruth’s mannerisms pointing out that his “grin makes friends where before there were only awed admirers.” The profile keeps going pretty much like this, alternating between pointing out how impressive Ruth’s public career is, and how he deals with fame privately. We the readers, are getting a rare inside look at the Babe Ruth who doesn’t just play baseball—he’s just one of us.

In a sense celebrity journalism understands what it's readers want and strives to give it to them, it is an exercise in empathy. Readers who encounter these kinds of articles are given a look into the intimate daily lives of celebrities and not only relate to them, but think they could become them. The intrigue and interest behind this kind of writing is the idea that celebrities are simply ordinary people plucked from obscurity, and the “real” person behind the celebrity is knowable. The gatekeeping power of hard news comes from deciding what is news. Celebrity journalism on the other hand is not just the gatekeeper of celebrity, but also the celebrity's real self. It is the journalist who has access to the true life of a celebrity, and it is essential that the true self feels accessible, it should be something that people can still discover, even if it is highly constructed (McDonnell 68).

While magazines at the time like Harper's Bazaar were publishing biographical pieces about celebrities, celebrity journalism is distinctly different because the journalists involved themselves in the narratives they were constructing. By doing so, they involved the reader in the intimate process of interviewing a celebrity. The journalists typically portrayed themselves as friends of the celebrity in order to make the reader feel not just like they were really getting the inside scoop, but that the information would not be available to them in any other magazine. One of the many ways journalists went about this is by going into great anecdotal detail about the setting and conditions of the meeting between authors and their subjects. These pieces were meant to make readers feel as though they had met them “face to face,”  and there was focus on portraying the “real” version of them. Long descriptions about their mannerisms or quirks, like with Babe Ruth’s grin or affinity for secret tunnels, made people think they were getting more reliable insight into what a celebrity is like than what the celebrities were saying about themselves. The journalist also focuses on the complexity and mystery of the subject, to make them seem even more human and hard to understand (Ponce de Leon 60). There was also more focus placed on interviews, which suddenly gave celebrities the ability to control part of their narrative. As Ponce de Leon points out, this is very appealing for celebrities, “This strategy gave many profiles a distinctly autobiographical tone, and enabled their subjects to assume greater control over their life stories — a feature, as we shall see, that was very attractive to celebrities interested in using the press to advance their careers and a major reason for their cooperation with prominent profile writers” (Ponce de Leon 61). For the readers, it was a chance to understand how celebrities spoke, and what they were like in real life. Interviews helped make celebrities seem like they were not just real people, but knowable people.

Along with photographs, all of these techniques were meant to humanize the celebrities journalists were profiling, but not all celebrities received this treatment. Race and gender greatly impacted how journalists attempted to understand their subjects. Celebrity journalists were hyper aware of what the public wanted to read, and knew that pushing the boundaries of race and gender was not particularly popular and could make them lose readers. People read celebrity journalism not to be pushed on their views of race, class and gender,  but to insert themselves briefly into a different world. By constantly reinforcing stereotypes, celebrity journalists managed to not alienate their readers. While this was and still is a problem in terms of creating an inclusive and equal society, it made this type of journalism accessible to all kinds of people. In the 1890s Booker T. Washington rose to national prominence, but unlike the white celebrities at the time who were subject to long flattering profiles, Washington was rarely written about. As Ponce de Leon explains, “Though he did everything that should have made him a worthy subject for celebrity treatment, editors and reporters for newspapers and magazines refused to ‘humanize’ him, perhaps recognizing the implications of such an angle during an era where white supremacy rested on the fundamental dehumanization of non whites. (Ponce de Leon 69). Celebrity journalism was founded on the idea that behind each celebrity is an ordinary and relatable person that a journalist could uncover and introduce to their reader.  It relied on the reader to empathize with the subject. During this time however, the idea of whiteness was being constructed, and people who feel outside this definition were not seen as part of the public, it was a radical idea at the time to think that whites and blacks had the kind of common ground that journalists strived to create between celebrities and readers (Ponce de Leon 69).

In the early 1900s, boxer Jack Johnson became the first black man to win the heavyweight championship. Typically this accomplishment resulted in endless media coverage, and profiles like the Babe Ruth one discussed earlier. Johnson, like many athletes at the time,  spent much of his free time in night clubs, often surrounded by prostitutes, and frequently got pulled over by the cops for speeding in his expensive car. When white athletes exhibited this kind of behavior, journalists would typically call the athlete “colorful” and work it into their profiles. Unlike previous heavyweight champions, Johnson however was rarely written about and  his transgressions were only discussed as a means of stating the necessity of the races being separate (Ponce de Leon 72).

This began to change in the 1930s, when newspapers in major cities saw an opportunity to reach a black audience. Another black boxer named Joe Louis, won the attention white reporters mostly by contrasting himself with Johnson, “adopting a modest, deferential demeanor outside the ring, a tactic that made it much easier for sports writers to promote him to white readers. By the early 1940s, Louis was the most highly publicized athlete in the United States” (Ponce de Leon 73). Race was and is a barrier to entry when it came to celebrity, and this time period set up a moral standard for blacks and other minorities, that whites were not held to. We still see this foundational racism in celebrity journalism, for example, a study from Fusion found only 14 percent of major fashion magazine covers in 2015 featured a woman of color (Marjon).   This remains true not just in celebrity news but hard news as well.

The 1920s also laid the groundwork for how women would be covered by celebrity journalism today. For the most part, women were rarely written about in the 19th century because of the idea that a woman’s place was in the private sphere, not the public. But this notion began to shift in the twenties, when female celebrities were becoming more visible and became the subjects of long profiles in magazines. Male celebrities still received much more attention than their female counterparts, but women were finally being accepted as part of the public sphere. These profiles however still focused intensely on their private lives, everything from their romantic lives, to their commitment to motherhood their beauty and tastes in fashion and home decor were the focus of the profiles (Ponce de Leon 68). Many female celebrities often refused to discuss what reporters considered “feminine subjects,” which made journalists far less interested in spending time writing about them. Some women, like Eleanor Roosevelt, navigated this sexism differently, choosing to discuss their private lives in order to get press coverage for the issues they cared about. While on one hand this allowed women to get substantive issues discussed in the public sphere, over time this strategy backfired, adding instead to the idea that motherhood and relationships were more important to women than men (Ponce de Leon 68).

This treatment of female celebrities is still felt today. Perhaps the strangest incarnation of these sexist profiles came in August of this with Vanity Fair’s August cover story about Margot Robbie. The writer, Rich Cohen, begins the profile by rambling about what it is like to look at Robbie,  "She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance. She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.” It's clear that he is trying to give the reader intimate details of what it is like to be and be near Robbie, but he still seems hopelessly out of touch. He goes on to give a classic anecdote about the time and place of their meeting, in which again he focuses on her looks. “I met Margot in the restaurant in the Mark hotel, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It’s a celebrity haunt. You sense them in the shadows, in their booths, tracking you with suspicious eyes. She wandered through the room like a second-semester freshman, finally at ease with the system. She stopped at tables along the way to talk to friends. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but it was simple, her hair combed around those painfully blue eyes. We sat in the corner. She looked at me and smiled.” Cohen ends the profile by transcribing an awkward line of questioning about shooting sex scenes and finally closing by comparing her to Audrey Hepburn (Cohen). In his attempts to turn Robbie into a familiar archetype that would be easy to understand for readers, Cohen reinforced tired clichés about "the girl next door" and pretty, successful women as a whole. Perhaps reassuringly, the public took to social media to make fun Cohen's sexisim, and Robbie herself even commented on the article saying the "the tone of [it] was really weird."

Even with its obvious problems, celebrity journalism was wildly popular because of its ability to relate to readers, something that hard news struggled with. But around the 1930s the public began to distrust these kinds of pieces because of how flattering they were to the celebrities they wrote about. As celebrity journalism scholar Graeme Turner, points out, celebrity news is managed not by the journalist but by the celebrity and their publicity team (Turner 145). Turner goes on to say, “The interdependence thus generated— that is, the journalist’s dependence on their sources within the entertainment industries and the entertainment industry's’ 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" (Turner 146). Because of this, celebrities in the 1930s had a hard time using the press to publicize themselves, since the genre itself inspired so much doubt.  They were beginning to lose an important outlet for publicity. In order to recreate the feeling of exclusivity and authenticity, newspapers and magazines wrote pieces trying to debunk the competition’s stories so that their own would seem more believable and trusted. The doubt surrounding celebrity journalism worked to their benefit, they were always looking for more information so that their readers would maintain interest in their publication, and the celebrities and studios wanted the publicity.  This meant that celebrities had to make themselves available to the press, whether they wanted to or not, to keep people buying newspapers and magazines (Ponce de Leon 102). Celebrities had to constantly respond to demands for interviews and photo ops and let the journalists use them “in broader social dramas and morality plays orchestrated by the journalists for public consumption, over which they had virtually no control. In short, while the press offered celebrities a vehicle for realizing their ambitions, the rifle was not free and it sometimes involved detours that made the lives of celebrities more difficult.” (Ponce de Leon 105). It's important to note that all of this was done to maintain the interest of the public. Good or bad, the rest of journalism does not show that kind of concern for the interests of its readers.  Celebrities were worried about this approach to reporting, and the lack of control worried the film studios.  Out of this was born a new era of celebrity journalism, the fan magazine.

Fan magazines were extremely popular publications focused solely on Hollywood movie stars and worked in partnership with the film studios of the time. It's important to note that even from the title of the genre, the reader is the main concern of the journalist writing these kinds of pieces. They contained long profiles of film stars, positive film reviews, and essentially acted a publicity machine for studios. Interestingly, we can see parallels to day with sites like Steve Banon's Breitbart News Network, which acts as a publicity machine for the GOP and specifically Trump. Anthony Slide wrote extensively about this particular phase of celebrity journalism in “Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine.” As Slide explains the relationship between the magazines and the studios was messy, “The entire Hollywood community needed the fan magazines as a collective mouthpiece, so did the fan magazines rely upon the film industry for their survival. Without the publicity photographs and access to the stars and to the filmmaking process, the fan magazines would have nothing to offer. At the same time, it did not take long for for Hollywood to realize that the fan magazine was a valuable publicity tool,” (Slide 7). Like the fake news stories written about Hillary Clinton and Trump during the election, frequently the content of these magazines was fabricated but readers didn't seem to mind. Mary Carlisle, Paramount Pictures star from the 1930s said the articles she read about herself had little basis in reality, “I would read things that I didn’t remember anything about. I never remember sitting down and giving an interview to a fan magazine. Stories were made up for publicity purposes,” (Slide 73). In "Confidentially Yours, The banality of the celebrity profile and how it got that way," Anne Helen Peterson discusses the fan magazine, Photoplay, one of the most popular fan magazines, would write profiles of celebrities based on biographical information provided by the studio and what were essentially made up quotes from the celebrity ("Confidentially Yours").  By the 1930s most of the fan magazines submitted their stories for studio approval, and fan magazine writers were frequently employed by the studios. Unfortunately for the studios and the magazines, this relationship would eventually undermine the magazine's’ popularity. The studios gave fan magazines a list of topics that they could and could not write about. For example, children and marriage were off limits because they could impact a star’s romantic image. Because all of the magazines were under the control of the studio's, most of them ended up producing very similar stories which became monotonous for readers over time (Slide 8). This problem made gossip columns and tabloids extremely popular because they provided new and interesting information about celebrities to their readers.

Tabloids and gossip rags promised authenticity by reporting on celebrity’s secret sex lives and other intriguing aspects of their personal lives. One particular magazine  called Confidential operated outside the grasp of the big movie studios. This is in sharp contrast to magazines like Photoplay, which depended on the studios for their access and their stories. The studios’ power was slowly disappearing over the course of the 1950s, which "meant that more and more stars were operating outside the constrictive yet protective arms of the studio. ("Confidentially Yours"). Prior to this shift in power, studios used their publicity departments to censure potentially damaging news stories, and used access to stars as leverage for controlling the narratives about them in the press. However, as gossip rags increased in popularity and the studios lost control over the stories written about their stars, the celebrities themselves hired their own publicity teams.   

While fan magazine were closing, the “iron horses of print journalism were on the decline” in large part because of TV news, with 20/20 and 60 minutes increasingly becoming more popular (Peterson 133). The New York Times vs. Sullivan ruling in 1964 opened the floodgates for gossip publications. The case made it so that publications could print anything about a public figure so long as they didn’t report with malice or “reckless disregard for the truth. Meanwhile, hard news outlets also faced another problem: “The late 1960s and early 1970s had been saturated with coverage of protests, assassinations, cultural unrest, Vietnam and Watergate. A representative Newsweek editorial claimed that the American public was 'tired of the serious issues and events that crowded the front pages for the last decade’ and was ‘demanding… entertainment,’" (Peterson 133).

The Watergate scandal is emblematic of made people get what Peterson calls  “serious issue fatigue” because it was troubling but also a great gossip story. In this moment in history, people equated authenticity with revealing scandals, and any action that can be perceived as revealing the truth about something was welcome (Peterson 133).  All of this combined made two things possible. The first being that gossip went mainstream, and serious news outlets began reporting on what they would otherwise consider soft news in an attempt to maintain readership. This is important because it is a moment when serious journalism begins to realize it has a readership problem. The second effect of this moment was that rising from the ashes of fan magazines and Life Magazine, Time launched People Magazine 1974. At the same time the National Enquirer rose to national prominence, and both of these publications managed to cover a different end of the celebrity gossip spectrum. "The popularity and life span of People and the National Enquirer can be linked to the fact that they combine two publications that lost popularity at the time, scandal regs and fan magazines." These magazines were a marriage of the two and they “expanded the audience for gossip, cloaking it in the quasi respectable trappings of journalism about everyday people and problems,” (Petersen 135).   

In an effort to maintain readership and high circulation figures, newspapers and magazines began using celebrity journalism and human-interest stories to get people to buy their publications. This did not mean that they worked narrative into the hard news stories they were covering, but rather tried to provide readers with celebrity news to read in the hopes that they would also read the hard news. Eventually, when it became clear that soft news was incredibly popular, writing that was focused the individuals and their scandals started appearing in hard news articles as well. Kate McNamara, "Author of Paparazzi: Media Practices and Celebrity Culture" says this led to what was essentially tabloidization of news, and "serious stories concerning political or social issues [were] sensationalized or framed in terms of human drama or tragedy,” (McNamara 105).

Journalists started seeking out the kinds of stories that celebrity journalism had been reporting on. One notable example of this was the media coverage surrounding politician Gary Hart. In 1987, Hart was a popular democrat who was likely to become the party’s nominee for president. Everything changed when Hart became the center of a personal scandal, one that marks a turning point in how journalists cover politics and in how the public judges presidential candidates. When Hart announced his candidacy for president, a journalist asked if he would be taking questions about his personal life because rumors of extramarital affairs were beginning to circulate. Hart told the reporter that his personal life was essentially not up for discussion. And up until this moment, the personal lives of presidents are not necessarily on display, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, their romantic affairs were not really considered news, and certainly not news that a journalist would go out of their way to uncover. Watergate once again changed how the public viewed these kinds of stories. As mentioned above, scandal became synonymous with revealing the truth, and the public was much more interested in the personal lives of presidents. In May of 1987, a reporter named Tom Fiedler, got a call from a woman saying that her friend was having an affair with Hart, and gave Fiedler the time and place of their next meeting. For the first time in campaign reporting, journalists actually went and staged a stake out. They saw a woman named Donna Rice go into a house where Hart was and they don’t see her leave until the morning. Because these journalists were not especially good at surveilling people, Hart notices and ends up having a conversation with them, in which he affirms once again that his private life is not a public issue. However, the Herald ran the story, and Hart’s political career came crashing down (NPR Fresh Air Podcast).  This marks a real tone shift in political reporting, suddenly people’s personal lives become part of their public narrative and it begins to look a lot more like celebrity news.  It is this moment in a sense that opens the door for someone like Trump in the future, scandal is good for ratings.

    Celebrity journalism from this point on stays its course, it really doesn’t change much in form or function after the 1970s and 1980s, in large part because it had a winning formula for attracting readers. The success of celebrity journalism is predicated on the idea that the journalists have access to the private image of celebrities. Us Weekly especially excelled at reaching its target audience. After becoming a weekly in in 2002, it increased its sales by 55.3 percent (McDonnell 2). It featured the extremely popular column, “Stars— They’re Just Like Us,” which regularly printed paparazzi photos of celebrities doing mundane tasks. Celebrities were using magazines and the paparazzi to perform their “ordinariness” and make themselves more relatable to their fans, meanwhile they hired teams of publicists to help them maintain their public “private” persona. Celebrity news thrived off of this paradox, "While celebrity journalism claims to throw open the curtains, bringing up the house lights, and give audiences a peek into the private, backstage lives of the stars, the backstage is now, in actually, a supplemental performance area, increasingly monitored and managed by the celebrities themselves,” (McDonnell 73). Taking a page from fan magazines, many celebrity magazines would create story arcs around celebrities and used posed and unposed photographs to supplement their narratives. An editor from Life and Style for example, revealed that because the magazine covered the Kardashian family positively early on in their climb to popularity, the Kardashians would agree to stage stories for the magazine (McDonnell 73). Magazines benefited from this performance and it showed with their readership and sales (McDonnell 2).

Even as gossip blogs like PerezHilton.com started popping up, the industry was still extremely lucrative for newspapers and magazines. This is because the giants of celebrity journalism had the resources to get celebrities to talk to them and could report on stories in a way that blogs couldn't. Martin Conboy, author of "Celebrity journalism an oxymoron?" says that this is in part because “it is through their engagement with celebrity that they maintain a lead over online sources as they are better resourced and can pry more consistently than the amateur blogger or paparazzo." Conboy goes on to say that through the tabloidization of hard news, "Celebrity has, as one of its functions, the extension of the influence of newspapers into the new century by enabling them to become integrated enough within popular cultural patterns to hold off media which may at first sight be more technologically attuned to contemporary demands,” (Conboy 174). It was the institutional power of celebrity journalism that kept it alive in the face of amature reporting. This is crucial because as the years go on, the rest of journalism also begins to compete with citizen journalism in the form of social media, and struggles to keep this institutional power. This is in part why Trump, a celebrity, was covered so intensely by hard news outlets during the primaries and into the general election. He was entertaining and viewers were interested. Journalists needed Trump, the problem was he did not need them.

All journalists, not just celebrity journalists, depend on the gatekeeping power they developed in the 1890s to maintain relevance. When social media took over the public sphere, suddenly that power was threatened, celebrities were in control of their own narratives, and the gatekeeping power was given to the people through trending topics, likes and hashtags. Social media and the increasing popularity of celebrity websites made a lot of what celebrity journalism tried to do obsolete (McNamara 134). In "To see and be seen: Celebrity practice on Twitter," Alice Marwick, discusses the production of celebrity on social media. She argues that social media has given celebrities the power to give fans a selective view of what their intimate and private lives are like without having to go through a journalist. Social media had given random ‘ordinary’ people the power to become ‘micro-celebrities' without the help of journalist but instead creating content on their social networks and gaining followers (Marwick 140). Colloquially, these are people who are ‘Instagram famous,’ ‘Twitter famous,’ or ‘Youtube famous,’ and have reached a degree of popularity and fame based solely on their social media presence. This path to celebrity cuts out the journalist as the middleman, micro-celebrities create their fame independently from celebrity newsmakers.

Beyond simply making people famous, social media has redefined how celebrities manage their fame. Celebrities can no longer mediate their interactions with fans through journalists or publicists, they must appear as though they are available to directly interact with fans (Marwick 139). This process of creating and maintaining fame on social media depends on an "ongoing maintenance of a fan base, performed intimacy, authenticity and access, and construction of a consumable persona,” (Marwick 140).  In the tradition of the long profiles of celebrities written celebrity magazines, social media is meant to be confessional. The fans and followers perceive the celebrities’ personal revelations on social media as a form of intimate contact with them, all while the celebrity continues to deny them access to anything beyond what they post. All of this maintains the illusion that there is more intimate knowledge to be learned by continuing to follow them on various forms of social media (McNamara 136). This is something that Trump excelled at, because he made his followers believe that journalists were not to be trusted and that he was the only with all the power and information they wanted.

 Trump's late night tweet rants are exactly the type of unfiltered content people want, and journalists were left to report on them.  For celebrities, social media platforms are effective because celebrities share things they would typically not reveal in Us Weekly or People, “on Twitter, performative intimacy is practiced by posting personal pictures and videos, addressing rumors, and sharing personal information,” (Warwick 148). Of course, what celebrities do and say on Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram is fair game for journalists looking to report on celebrities, and subsequently can create a PR problem that publicists must address (Turner 148). However, before social media, celebrities had to respond to unflattering rumors through the journalists, now they can address stories like this on their Twitter, website, app, or other social media platform (Marwick 146). Often celebrities interact with fans directly through their social media platforms, making their followers feel like they are or could be an insider.

Instagram and Snapchat in particular show fans intimate photos of celebrities in their homes, with friends, or backstage. This makes the paparazzi essentially useless because even with impressive zoom lenses, they can’t capture the level of intimacy that celebrities can so easily share, “the ease with which these images can be captured, shared and then sold, seems alarmingly simple. Moreover, the connection between people — the celebrity and civilian in this case — is ever more transparent,” (McNamara 119). Actor James Franco who’s Instagram is predominantly selfies, penned an article for The New York Times in which he talked about the way the selfie has changed celebrity journalism. As Franco puts it "We speak of the celebrity selfie, which is its own special thing. It has value regardless of the photo’s quality, because it is ostensibly an intimate shot of someone whom the public is curious about. It is the prize shot that the paparazzi would kill for, because they would make good money; it is the shot that the magazines and blogs want, because it will get the readers close to the subject,” (Franco). Franco points out that this up-close-and-personal shot frequently gets him more followers and likes, "The likes spin out of control for selfies of me and my two handsome brothers, especially Dave, the other actor, whose image pulls in its own legion of teenage fans,” (Franco).  

   Social media has given celebrities the upper hand in their relationship with the press. They no longer need to talk to reporters to reach their audience, nor do they have to depend on them to stage stories about themselves. Newspapers on the other hand still needed celebrities to keep their readers and subscribers engaged and willing to pay for their publications. The result of this was essentially a shift in the way that reporters covered celebrities. To get them to agree to an interview, reporters essentially had to guarantee a positive profile. The result is a celebrity profile basically written from the point of view of a fan, idealizing the celebrity at every turn. In her analysis of the so-called “fanboy profile," Clover Hope explains the reasons why respected journalists might avoid negative stories about the celebrities they interview. In order to not risk precious relationships with celebrities, journalists let go of any kind of critique, "It’s tough to write critically about a famous subject; it’s much easier to trade insight for pure flattery, ensuring that magazine their access and that writer an opportunity to write that profile again. But the fanboy profile benefits everyone involved in it and none of its readers. It’s a PR piece done artfully, targeted primarily at the uncritical, which means the hordes of celebrity fans who will distribute the piece for free online,” (Hope).

In a Complex Magazine profile titled “Drake In Real Life," journalist Ernest Baker described his experience following Drake around the music festival Coachella.  Baker frequently referenced his friendship with Drake and the similarities the two supposedly share. "Being around Drake has reinforced that he is a real person, an actual human being—more than just a meme for public consumption,” he wrote. He uses the familiar anecdote technique to create the illusion of closeness, "Drake greets me like he’s known me for a decade.” Baker goes on to discuss Drake’s set at Coachella, which he famously bombed. He finds a way to spin the disastrous performance by saying “Yes, I’ve seen better Drake shows, but this weekend’s reality check was a welcomed one. Ladies and gentlemen, you have your arc. How will Drake redeem himself next weekend? Will the world still stop the next time he drops new music? The plot thickens,” (Baker). This is certainly an interesting way of side stepping any negative criticism someone my throw Drake’s way.

These kinds of profiles teach us that social media has created a kind of bubble for celebrities, one where stories that could be considered critical or negative, simply are not reported on. This kind of bubble has extended itself into the world of politics and hard news as we have seen through the unfiltered coverage of Trump rallies and the way in which Trump attacks journalists who try to criticize him through Twitter. For him, the purpose of Twitter is to constantly construct narratives in which he is a  "winer" and is right, while those who question him are "losers" and wrong.  

It’s important to remember that celebrity has expanded to include politicians, and the worlds of hard and soft news aren’t distinguishable so anymore. Social media has taken over the role that news outlets used to have of curating, distributing and breaking news. Now, roughly 44% of the American population gets its news from Facebook and Twitter. News outlets are left to compete with this by producing content that is increasingly more entertaining than informative. Journalists have looked to celebrity journalism to figure out how to stay relevant in terms of readership and their answer has continued to be the tabloidization of hard news, “as the media move more towards the role of providing entertainment rather than information — 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,” (Turner).  

People who are critical of celebrity news and the tabloidization of journalism are pointing to the treatment of celebrities I described above to show the potential dangers of journalism losing its ability to be critical because they need to maintain access (Hope). They have argued that celebrity journalism is an oxymoron, essentially that the two words are not compatible because this style of reporting is the antithesis of journalism (Conboy 171). But the relationship between entertainment and news is more complex,  “Journalism that contains information and entertainment, can divert and concentrate the mind, and is vital to democracy and to the well-oiled functioning of the rumor mill. It owes, according to many of its more principled practitioners as well as its political advocates, an allegiance to the democratic good but only persists because it can make sizable profits for global conglomerates. (Conboy 172)” Essentially, tabloidization is a double edged sword, on the one hand it has helped extend the relevance of newspapers and magazines into the 21st century, on the other, it has threatened the ability of journalism to fulfill its duty to inform the public. Politicians, for example, have already become celebrities, they "are appearing in venues previously reserved for celebrities: presidential candidates tweet, blog, appear on Saturday Night Live, and star in their own reality shows, (think former vice-presidential nominee  and family on TLC’s Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” (McDonnell 32). They do this with and without the help of journalism, their celebrity is created once again by mediating an intimate relationship with their followers.

And then of course there’s Trump, his controversial persona is a perfect nexus of all the issues I have been discussing. He understands how to communicate directly with his voter base through the revelation of his intimate thoughts on social media. Trump, a man who ran his campaign on a foundation of hate, has done an impressive job of empathizing with his voter base and giving them what they want. Where politicians used to need journalists, he has himself. This of course has been troubling to journalists. To name a few scenarios, Trump has repeatedly attacked not just news organizations but individual reporters like Megan Kelly and Katy Tur. He has denied reporters for the Washington Post press access when he thought the coverage was unfavorable. He has threatened to sue Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post because of coverage he simply did not like. He threatened to sue the New York Times for libel after they published a story on his tax returns. More recently he has even claimed that he wants to “open up” libel laws, so that individuals can sue news organizations more easily (NPR Morning Edition).

Now in the midst of his transition to power, Trump has broken once again with tradition, not allowing a press pool to follow him in the hectic days since the election. The press made headlines after Trump ditched them to go to the 21 Club for dinner. This is completely unprecedented as press pools have been a fixture of the presidency since FDR.  As the Associated Press put it, "long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on its new leader” (Hennessy). Several press associations penned an open letter to Trump expressing their distress at him forgoing the press pool. In response one of Trumps, spokes person has said that the press will have “all of the access that they have ever had under any president,” (Hennessy). Fortune’s Mathew Ingram summarized the problem by saying "A weakened and increasingly marginalized traditional media, fighting with the tools of a previous era, surrounded by more nimble adversaries who know how to use social platforms for their own ends, and a president who is actively hostile to the traditional press. Not that long ago, it probably felt like things couldn’t get any worse for the media—but they just did,” (Ingram).

In thinking about celebrity journalism, it's easy to write it off as something that is irrelevant to our lives. As a field, journalism has consciously strayed away from narrative and human interest journalism, instead writing it off frivolous or biased. But that's the issue. To use Trump's election as a parallel once more, part of the reason it was such a shock was because the facts all said he would lose. Those "facts" were based on polls and the quantitative research that journalism often relies on to back up its claims. Journalists forgot about the people. Had they spent hours talking to voters and seeing how mobilized the Trump contingent was, it would have come as less of a shock when he won. The numbers may not have predicted his win, but a close look at the people voting for him might have.

    It's this lack of empathy with readers, sources, and essentially the public, that has plagued journalism.  And that’s dangerous, because we now live in a world where a former reality tv show star known for being rich and white is going to be our president. With new information coming out every day about Trump's conflicts of interest, foreign powers hacking our elections, and controversial cabinet members, we need to have access to the power that journalism as an institution once had. We need journalists to hold truth to power, but to do that they need the support of the public which they have consistently alienated for decades. The stakes are too high for journalists to continue ignoring the reader in favor of what they think is worth knowing. Newspapers and media outlets taking a look at why what they’re doing isn’t attracting readers, and a real look at the popularity of celebrity journalism can provide answers.

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