MSNBC celebrates ten years of gossip online
As the Internet “grows up,” pioneering news Websites are celebrating their ten year anniversaries. Last month, The Washington Post celebrated its ten years online with a retrospective tracing the evolution of the delivery of news online and marking the role it has played in that evolution, as I present in “Ten Internet Years: The Washington Post wishes itself happy anniversary.”
Jeannette Walls waxes poetic in “Celebrity ‘news’ goes supersonic on Internet, Rise of blogs, on-demand access turn gossip into no-holds-barred enterprise”
Ten years ago, gossip addicts had to work to get their fix. Many newspapers didn’t have their own gossip columns. They flourished in the tabloids in New York and a few other big cities, but anyone living elsewhere had to hope that the juicy celeb tidbits were picked up in the local paper — or plead with city friends to have them read over the phone. Or wait until the weekends to buy the supermarket tabs, enduring the disapproving stares of the other shoppers…
One day in 1996, a friend offered to show me how to use this thing called the Internet…
in late 1998, when I was offered a job on the Internet, I leapt at the chance…
there are more gossip sites than ever — and some of the most aggressive celeb reporting out there is done on the Internet — by media that neither needs nor wants access to the celebs. The print media has responded by getting more aggressive…then there are those gossip bloggers...— sites that obsessively round up the most juicy tidbits of the day and serve them out with wickedly wry running commentary. they get carpal tunnel syndrome for the sake of dish so that you don’t have to.
Today, anyone with a computer has access to more gossip than I did with my armful of newspapers 10 years ago. And they don’t have to wear black clothes.