Yesterday on PerezHilton.com, there were three postings keeping up with the mental health of Miss Britney Spears and her trips to the psychiatric ward of the LA hospital at which she is becoming a regular.
D-listed.com is a celebrity gossip site that prizes itself for updating every fifteen minutes.
Gofugyourself.com is a constant stream chronicling the fashion choices of celebrities.
All three include links to videos, sound clips, and archives of celebrity activity.
Launching writers to stardom, these sites are quickly surpassing the printed word in up-to-date coverage and popularity.
Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., under the pseudonym ‘Perez Hilton,’ has bounded his way into Hollywood limelight as the self-proclaimed ‘queen of all media.’ He gained infamy in 2005 when The Insider called his site Hollywood’s most hated web site.
The outspoken tongue-in-cheek blogging, accompanied by photography digitally doodled-on has become his trademark. And his own newfound celebrity has allowed him to penetrate the world of celebrity events.
“People just want a lot of content,” Mr. Lavandeira told the New York Times. “There’s this insatiable thirst, this appetite for celebrity news. So I feed it well.”
Evolving from the tabloid and gossip column, e-gossip offers more than the gossip magazine, thanks to updates that are possible several times a day even while magazine websites update their sites only once or twice daily, at best.
These bloggers are famous for delighting readers with the harshest of criticism (including words unfit for print) and the most uncensored opinions.
The ability to provide free up-to-date information on events as they happen trumps any business the printed word can provide.
Recently, PerezHilton.com received over 10 million hits within 24 hours, whereas OK Magazine has only ever sold a maximum of two million copies when they have the grandest of celebrity news-which is three times its usual circulation.
Even newspapers are rushing to catch up to the nature of the e-gossip beast. The Washington Post has hired Liz Kelly, granddaughter of Philadelphia Inquirer employees and the daughter of Tom Kelly, Pentagon spokesman during the Gulf War, to maintain a gossip blog, Celebritology, on their website.
During a time when “Entertainment Tonight” draws 7.4 million viewers while the CBS evening news can only muster 6.7 million, celebrity gossip is becoming a hot commodity.
In order to keep up, news media is finding that if they can’t beat them, they might as well join ’em-or at least employ them.