TORONTO - Is our appetite for celebrity gossip waning, spurred on by the mystifying fame of cookie-cutter reality stars and a preponderance of speculative stories that rarely come to pass?
Some are suggesting that a 10-year tidal wave of Hollywood celebrity news has crested and is beginning to recede -- though others counter that, in fact, the unfiltered gossip found on blogs and websites is pulling readers away from more traditional sources of dirt.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United States says sales of four popular celebrity gossip magazines -- Life and Style, In Touch, Star and People -- flattened or declined in the second half of 2007. Only US Weekly and OK! were continuing to attract new readers.
In recent article entitled "Who The Hell Are Heidi and Spencer?'' on Salon.com (www.salon.com), Rebecca Traister opines that erstwhile gossip junkies are kicking the habit lately because they don't care about the private lives of reality TV stars like Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, the despised young couple from "The Hills.''
Even the New York Post's Liz Smith, the grande dame of Hollywood dirt, wrote recently that the golden age of celebrity gossip had long passed and celebrity watchers were rapidly losing interest.
"There's nothing going on in celebrity land. There's no news, no gossip, no scandal,'' she wrote. "We are being dished up loads of stuff about people we have never heard of and don't care about.''
Elaine Lui, arguably Canada's best-known chronicler of celebrity gossip, scoffs at the suggestion that the public is no longer hungry for celebrity gossip. If magazine circulation numbers are going down, Lui says, that's likely because people are flocking to real-time blogs and websites for their fix instead of waiting for magazines to hit the stands days after the action.
"The blogs are a major factor and they are affecting magazines like People Magazine and people like Liz Smith, who are very publicist-friendly,'' the correspondent for CTV's "ETalk'' said in a recent interview.
"Blogs and websites are having a negative impact on those old-school types of reporters and entertainment journalists who rely on publicists for information. The smart magazines, like US Weekly, they recognized the trend and realized they needed to step up their game because the blogs were starting to hurt them.''
Lui says traffic to her website, Lainey's Entertainment Update, (www.laineygossip.com), only continues to increase, and Smith's gripes are simply sour grapes.
"Liz Smith is a dinosaur -- she's harkening back to an age where she had tea with people and co-operated with publicists and printed the stories that the publicists wanted out there. And people aren't interested in that kind of sugar-coated Hollywood story anymore; people are interested in the dirt. She's not willing to go there, so that's why she's becoming obsolete.''
Anna Holmes, editor of the wildly popular Gawker Media blog, Jezebel (www.jezebel.com), also scoffs at Smith's complaints.
"Honestly, what she traffics in, in my opinion, is not gossip. It's party announcements and observations with a few bold names thrown in,'' says Holmes. "I don't know anyone who reads Liz Smith to get juicy bits.''
But Holmes, whose website presents a lively mix of political news, celebrity gossip and lifestyles stories with a feminist bent, says she is indeed sensing that the public is getting bored by the antics of celebrities.
"I suspect that people are just tired of it. I know I am. Many of these people are really boring. Maybe when a larger portion of the population is able to get their 15 minutes, those 15 minutes don't mean anything anymore,'' she says.
And magazines could be losing readers, Holmes says, because they are often woefully inaccurate. This weekend, for example, Star magazine reported that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had wed in New Orleans, but it was quickly revealed the story was false and the couple had not even been in the city.
"There are just too damn many of them, and now that the majority have been around for three to five years and have shown to have a questionable track record with regards to veracity, perhaps people have finally realized that these magazines are not to be believed. How many times have we read about Angelina and Brad on the verge of getting married, or Jennifer Aniston is about to adopt and then it never pans out?''
Lui, however, argues that gossiping about the rich and famous is a pastime as old as mankind and it's not going away any time soon.
"Look at the whole Britney Spears meltdown -- she is a legitimate star now and there's a billion-dollar industry surrounding her,'' Lui says.
"Gossip is immortal, it will never die. It is not on the wane. As long as there's Britney and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, gossip will continue to thrive, and there will always be Britneys and Brads and Angelinas to come.''
