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Celebrity Gossip

Our local commercial news source in Australia (news.com.au) used to have relatively good journalism. They’ve always pandered to the popular stories a little bit, but now it’s really got out of control. Today’s front page:

It’s bad enough that the front page is full of boobs (more than just that big picture) but it’s basically devoted to celebrity gossip. I highlighted the various parts to clarify:

orange for celebrity gossip
blue for actual news
purple for site content/competitions (non news stuff)
green for ads

On the bright side there’s not many ads on the site, it’s just those two small areas. But what’s really turned me off is all that orange — basically half the front page is about celebrities and their breasts. Don’t get me wrong, I love breasts — but not when I’m looking to read news.

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VInko
January 10th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Are you surprised Stew? These websites are dependent on advertising revenue. The gossip shite draws in the reader and usually the ads are aimed towards the reader of a certain topic.
So in this instance, people interested in reading about boob jobs maybe interested in reading about other celebrity boob jobs, cosmetic surgery, latest fashion “innovations” etc etc.
Watch MediaWatch on ABCTV Monday nights for some insightful, yet sometimes pretentious, commmentary on exactly what you’re talking about. When a website that you were reading for news has the header “Western Australia’s premier news, sport, entertainment and lifestyle site” you have to think about looking elsewhere for news.
The reader has to be discerning: even ABC News and SBS News websites have ads, blogs and entertainment shite. Society has gone vain, shallow, image-centric, money-oriented, and well on it’s way to body-beautiful-Fantasy-land. Not only sex, but voyeurism sells these days. Viewer beware…
Charles Miller
January 11th, 2008 at 6:35 am
We were having just this discussion on the intranet at work today. (Except our target of choice was smh.com.au. You’d sort of expect better from Fairfax).

Media Watch spent some time covering the decline of online journalism earlier this year. As far as I know, online has different editorial staff to print, and because the web gives you direct feedback on which stories get read, are highly focused on getting hits and ad impressions.

Drew ‘Fark’ Curtis put it like this in a video interview:

“…previously if you were Time or Newsweek you would have to do surveys to your readers and say: ‘well what is it that you’re reading? what do you like about us?’ [and they'd say] ‘Oh, I like the sports. I like the politics’. Well, nobody ever said ‘Oh I like the article with the guy that had sex with a horse.’ You know, that never came up… nobody ever said that, but now that we can track the actual articles and see what people are going after, this is what they actually want, this is actually where the numbers are going to, and that presents a huge problem for media.”
Stewart
January 11th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I was talking about this with some folks yesterday, and they pointed out that The Australian online has no celebrity news & gossip in it. I checked it out this morning, and it’s much better then news.com.au.

I’m actually a little surprised, since The Australian is a subdomain of news.com.au.

It seems I can a reasonable round up of Australian news between The Australian and ABC News.