Anonymous Gossip Is Keeping Celebrity Culture Alive—for Better or Worse
As silly as it might sound to some people who don’t know the industry and might see entertainment journalists as glorified paparazzi, I actually went to school for this. No, not to write about entertainment or lifestyle or go off about Star Wars. But I did go to school to learn how to write about news, craft a headline, conduct an engaging interview, and all that jazz.
Entertainment journalism, specifically, is a bit of a different beast, one that not many people understand. While you have tabloids full of made-up rumors and wild gossip, well-respected news sources like People, Rolling Stone, and, yes, The Daily Beast don’t print things that haven’t been fact-checked or that they can’t confirm with multiple sources. But those “sources” are often from right inside a celebrity’s PR team, making most of what we read on magazine shelves or our TV screens massive PR campaigns, creating the image of the celebrity that we know and love (or hate) today.
This is why celebrity blind items are such a soothing balm to people like me, someone who knows that the public image of a celebrity is so fluffed up and manufactured the majority of the time. These pieces of gossip, which are posted online completely anonymously, give nicknames and hints to which celebrities they’re talking about; it’s up to the reader to piece the clues together as to what the blind item is trying to say. They give us a peek at the salacious underbelly of celebrities, stories that their PR team would hate for us to know. These unverified, unsourced rumors are just so juicy, sharing them has become a whole industry. Perez Hilton made a name for himself by posting such rumors in the early 2000s, and independent gossip sites like Crazy Days and Nights and Lainey Gossip have published user-submitted blind items for nearly two decades.