ABSTRACT

This chapter talks about the discourses and values of celebrity when people consider the social function of celebrity culture. It argues the proposition that people are experiencing something which may well amount to the celebrification of the media. In general, 'celebrity news' has settled down now into being a widely used industry descriptor for the reporting and commentary on celebrity. Producing celebrity gossip as news is, then, a cooperative cultural production, a pleasurable collaborative narrative in which, ideally, the audience is as much implicated as the journalist. Celebrity journalism is far from the first to treat the news as a means of entertaining its audience. The chapter highlights some significant specificities which distinguish the industrial production of news about celebrities from the practices of more traditional forms of journalism. Kim McNamara has published a very useful discussion of the role of the paparazzi in the production of celebrity.