Burn the Tabloid

It's time to give up the ghost.

Hello, Messketeers!

On Friday, I participated in Substack’s Burn Night and it was a lovely evening for all involved. There were cocktails served in generic hotel lobby tea cups, BK Whoppers and fries aplenty, and a heaping helping of scintillating hot takes. I also believe I convinced a handful of civilians to join our ranks without fully realizing what it is exactly they’re signing up for. I was there to read a piece I wrote about why I think we are living in a post-tabloid era and it’s time to give up the ghost of traditional celebrity media already. For those who weren’t able to make it to this intimate soirée, I thought it would be nice to share those musings with you now. So, here they are.

Thank you all for reading and supporting the mildly unhinged work I do here month after month. I’ll see you all again on Friday for my usual diatribe! <3

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As I’m sure everyone in this room is acutely aware, traditional media is dying, along with most of our jobs. Just this week, even Tina Brown admitted that “magazines are mostly done.” But what you might not realize is that no publishing medium is more deserving of that untimely demise than the celebrity tabloid. And I would argue that what we’re currently witnessing transpire in that sector is less its death throes and more of a full-blown Weekend at Bernie’s situation. Except, in this case, not even Bernie knows he’s dead yet. But thankfully, I’m here tonight to finally lay the bones of those gossip rags to rest once and for all.

Lest you think I’m just some uptight hater who can’t get down with a juicy piece of celebrity dirt, first of all, read my newsletter. You’ll quickly learn that could not be further from the truth. But also, I happen to have spent the last decade of my life working at these same tabloid institutions whose termination I’m now calling for. That means I know first hand just what a true clusterfuck they actually are. In 2015, after landing my first corporate gig at People magazine, I often found myself baffled by our editorial strategy which emphasized describing famous people’s Instagram posts back to our readers in verbose detail in order to reach the minimum word count needed to meet Google SEO best practices.

Every morning at 7am I would sit at my desk dreaming up new ways to describe the color of Kylie Jenner’s latest wig in obsequiously florid terms. And every morning I would wonder, who is this content for……Who wants to read me wax poetic about Jennifer Aniston in a bikini? You already follow all of your favorite celebrities on social media, why would you need their content regurgitated back to you via a third party? It seemed obvious to me even back then that Instagram was slowly chipping away at the middleman of celebrity media, and things have only gotten radically worse since then.