Newest celebrity in Paris is Austrian-born queen who was guillotined in 1793.

At the Ladure patisserie on Paris’s left bank, the calorific Marie Antoinette Collection filling two window displays gave a new meaning to the mythical phrase let them eat cake. Pyramids of pastel macaroons inspired by the ball gowns of the "unappreciated heroine" were on sale next to white chocolate royal carriages and special Marie Antoinette tea.

"She’s everywhere you look," sighed Pascal Seebag, a businessman from Aix-en-Provence, queuing for macaroons.

"When I was at school she was just ‘that wicked queen’, but now she’s a misunderstood celebrity. The fact that we’re a republic makes no difference. We’re obsessed with celebrity gossip magazines and other countries’ royal families. We had King Mitterrand and King Chirac, we have a monarchic presidency, so I suppose it’s a logical step that we’ve become completely obsessed with Marie Antoinette."

Ladure – ironically on rue Bonaparte – is not the only business to realise that France’s last queen, who was guillotined amid popular jubilation in 1793, has become a powerful marketing tool, taking over from Napoleon as icon of the moment. Ladure supplied the cakes for Sofia Coppola’s anachronistic punk-rock film Marie Antoinette. Described as "Lost in Revolution" by one French writer, the film was booed at Cannes and rather than the Palme d’Or it won the Palm Dog for best canine performance, by a pug called Mops. But some newspapers lauded its frivolity, and young audiences have made a rush of inquiries to the Marie Antoinette fan club.

Cashing in

The Marie Antoinette publishing boom, already riding high on last year’s 250th anniversary of her birth, has been revived. Historians have taken to TV chatshows to debate the queen. A Michelin-starred restaurant at Versailles is offering a Marie Antoinette meal, a CD has been made of music she would have listened to and a limited edition of the perfume she wore is to go on sale for thousands of euros.

So it is no surprise that the Chateau of Versailles – Marie Antoinette’s home from her arrival from Austria aged 14 to marry the future Louis XVI until four years before her death – is cashing in. Today the castle opens its Marie Antoinette estate, a tour of the queen’s fantasy playhouses, including the Petit Trianon, pavilions, grottoes, the thatched-roof cottage where she played at being poor, and the mock farm complete with sheep, goats and geese where she liked to pretend to be a milkmaid.

There are no new exhibitions but the restored buildings have been opened up and rebranded as a paying Marie Antoinette tour. Of the 4 million visitors to Versailles each year, until now only 300,000 had ventured to Marie Antoinette’s corner of the Versailles gardens. The museum staff make no secret of wanting to seize on tourists’ interest in the film and happily refer to Marie Antoinette as "the Lady Di of her era".

"It’s delightful, but it’s all very surprising," said Lady Antonia Fraser of the phenomenon now known in France as Marie Antoinette mania. Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette was the basis for Coppola’s script and has just been translated into French. It has been on the bestseller lists for five weeks.

"When I was doing my book all those years ago Marie Antoinette was not exactly flavour of the month within France," she said. "I would be going round museums or Versailles and I would hear teachers telling the children this is a wicked queen. I wanted to burst out in indignation but I thought to myself, no, no, go away and write your book." She added: "I hesitate to pronounce about this, but France is in a period of introspection. They have looked again at Marie Antoinette. Once they looked, they liked what they saw and prepared to revise the view that they maybe had been taught as children."

It is not a rehabilitation, she stressed, but a question of trying to understand the tragic queen as a human being.

In Le Figaro, Sbastian le Fol said the French were no longer "asking whether she should or shouldn’t have had her head chopped off … now Marie Antoinette the queen is less important than Marie Antoinette the woman".

Soap opera

As the boundaries between the public and private lives of French politicians blur, with the presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy staging a public reunion with his wife Cecilia, and the Socialist frontrunner Sgolne Royal hinting this week that she will marry her long-term partner, the Socialist party leader, Franois Hollande, some argue that France is happy to return to the greatest celebrity of all – the real-life soap opera of one of its historical hate figures.

Queen at 18, Marie Antoinette was an Austrian outsider, a frivolous big spender who ordered two pairs of shoes a week. She evolved as a politician before she was imprisoned, tried on charges that included incest and beheaded for treason, but the myths about her abound. Her supposed comment "if they don’t have bread, let them eat brioche" was in fact an urban tale that had been doing the rounds before she was born.

In her study in Paris the historian Evelyne Lever, who advised Coppola, served tea on a silver tray and explained that France’s current period of malaise had sparked an escapist retreat into a history. "We’re dancing on a volcano and daren’t look into it, so we turn towards frivolity. Marie Antoinette fits that bill because she was a fashion victim. If you want to understand Marie Antoinette’s place in politics, put Lady Diana in place of Margaret Thatcher."

Marie Antoinette still attracts fans like Michele Lorin, 60, head of the Marie Antoinette fan club, whose flat in Paris is filled with thousands of pieces of memorabilia including books, cuttings, busts, a Marie Antoinette Barbie and a porcelain Miss Piggy dressed as Marie Antoinette. "I have dedicated my life to La Reine," she said. "The queen has given me an education which until I started collecting busts at 12, I never had. She has given me culture."

© Guardian News & Media 2008 Published: 6/30/2006

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An appetite for tittle-tattle Politicians join the stars as targets for a wave of expos magazines.

It is not, the casual visitor would think, very French. Kate Moss and Kelly Brook bare-breasted on the beach, features on ‘Fifties stars and their sex lives’, a raft of tittle-tattle on French B-list celebrities and, horror of horrors, gossip about politicians. For decades the French have shunned the tawdry tell-all tastes of the British and Americans. Not any longer.

This week, the annual announcement of the end-of- the-year circulation figures will show that, for the first time, the leading weekly titles of what is called the ‘presse people’ are selling a total of well over a million a week. While fewer and fewer read flagship papers such as Le Monde and Libration, the celeb-based gossip and cheap fashion tips of Voici, Public and the loudest and brassiest newcomer, Closer, pull in the punters. Laurence Pieau, the forthright and unapologetic editor in chief of Closer, is widely seen as the standard bearer of the new wave.

Many in France believe the arrival of a tabloid press, in the form of cheap glossy magazines, reveals a deeper malaise, in part a result of the inexorable and profound influence of the dreaded ‘globalisation’ on local lifestyle and language.

‘French people, like the British and the Americans, seem to have developed a rabid appetite for the secrets of their contemporaries,’ said one leader writer, with barely disguised distaste. ‘There is a tidal wave of confessions, stolen photos, tell-all whispers … and the French just lap it up.’

But, though it was at first necessary to borrow a word from English to describe the new magazines, the ‘presse people’ is now so much a part of the cultural landscape that a range of neologisms have now entered everyday speech. The French media are therefore undergoing a process of ‘peopolisation’.

‘One of the reasons for our success is that society has become "peopolised",’ said Jean-Paul Lubot, the senior executive who launched Closer in June.

Other magazines too have attracted criticism – and readers. The latest issue of Choc runs to 114 pages of colour pictures, ranging from a man having sex with a giant scorpion – illustrating the dangers of Aids – to corpses in Iraq, to topless shots of a young French actress in the latest Harry Potter film. Launched a little over a year ago, it sells 370,000 copies every fortnight and already has a number of imitators.

Grard Ponson, Choc’s editor, told The Observer that his inspiration had been Life magazine’s photojournalism: ‘The aim is to have the magazine read from beginning to end, and people are not going to wade through pages of text any longer, no matter how well written and well informed it is. We have all been affected by globalisation.’

The process has gone beyond magazines. One of the biggest draws on TV has been Star Academy, a cross between Big Brother and Pop Idol, in which a score of young hopefuls live and train under the cameras in the hoping of making careers in showbusiness. Many articles in Closer and Voici feature contenders from the programme. A reality show in which an overweight and deliberately gross comedian pretended to be the adored fianc of a beautiful girl to shock her unknowing parents has been one of the hits of the year.

The phenomenon has now touched politics, gnawing away at the long tradition of the private and public lives of French public figures remaining separate. The love life of Nicholas Sarkozy, the controversial interior minister and presidential hopeful, has filled pages. Photographs of his wife, from whom he has separated, with a male friend in America pushed sales of Paris Match to over half a million. Only the Pope’s death sold more. Last month Sarkozy moved to block the sale of a biography of his wife, sparking more headlines.

‘When the dramatic production of your life and relationships and marriage, like that of Sarkozy, becomes an essential ingredient of your political identity, then that really is "peopolisation",’ said Claude Bertolone, a socialist member of parliament.

Closer has caused the biggest stir. The magazine, which last week carried a six- page feature on stars and their love lives, revealing who ‘like oral’ and who ‘like to talk during sex’, has sold an average of more than 400,000 copies since the summer.

The magazine was successful, Lubot said, simply because of the huge interest in the daily life of stars: ‘But we are very careful not to mock people. If you mock the celebrities, you mock the readers. Readers in France have rather different expectations than those in the UK.’

At Voici, executives are also keen to distance themselves from the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ market: ‘We have a very different tone. We are not vulgar or nasty, we are funny and impertinent. In fact, we are very French.’

But it is not a France that many abroad, brought up on images of Gallic intellectualism, might recognise. ‘That was always a bit of a legend,’ said Philippe Kartzenty, president of Media Ratings, a Paris-based consultancy.

‘If the French were so intellectual they would read more newspapers and less of these magazines. When you ask people which TV channel they prefer, they all say it is the most serious and the most intelligent but the actual viewing figures reveal something totally different.’

Kartzenty said that the ‘presse people’ was one of the only sectors of the otherwise relatively reverential media which has challenged the country’s political and cultural elites: ‘These magazines are the only genuinely free publications. The rest is obedient. The presse people constitutes the only zone of genuine press liberty.’

Many of the new magazines, several of which are owned by foreign companies, budget for substantial libel payouts. They are also usually staffed by reporters who are far less close to politicians than those on more prestigious publications.

However, there are some reminders that the ‘presse people’ phenomenon is still somewhat exceptional. Last week, the ‘people pages’ of the tabloid France Soir included, along with an expos of Gerard Depardieu’s ‘women’, one quote from Michel Foucault, the philosopher, and another from Iris Murdoch.

© Guardian News & Media 2008 Published: 12/11/2005

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The typical modern-day celebrity has gone from rags to riches and risen out of obscurity. Many of our most-treasured celebrities have fairly standard, working class backgrounds and are keen to project an ‘I’m just like you’ image to the masses.

Now, we’ve all heard the ‘Jenny from the Block’ story enough times; celebrities are often keen to make us believe they’ve firmly got their feet on the ground; heads screwed on correctly and won’t forget their past. The problem is that it’s difficult for the general public to believe celebrities are just like us when they start turning into divas and making ridiculous demands wherever they go…

JLO is the classic example, she has bolstered an image of herself as the girl from the Bronx who had a tough upbringing and has finally landed on her feet. The only thing is, JLO’s bizarre and extremely picky demands don’t match up to her Jenny from the Block persona. Would good old Jenny demand a room temperature of 25.5 degrees Celsius? Or Egyptian cotton only sheets, with a minimum thread count of 250? Surely she’d be happy with a thread count of 249.

It has been reported that JLO’s diva demands don’t stop there; she has a notorious reputation for making diva demands and at a recent stay in a London hotel, had a list of demands two pages long. She reportedly asked for everything in her room to be white, including candles, couches, curtains and flowers. A requirement for her coffee to be stirred counter-clockwise only, signifies the height of the diva demand.

Then we move on to Mariah. No-one does diva demands like Mariah Carey; she makes JLO’s demands seem perfectly reasonable by comparison. Amongst Mariah’s demands you’ll find an attendant to dispose of her chewing gum, two air purifiers, gold faucets to be installed throughout her many dressing rooms, a box of bendy straws, and yes, the most ridiculous demand of the lot: a supply of kittens and puppies for the night. When demands start to include animals, surely someone has to draw a line? – Apparently not when it comes to Mariah.

Megastar celebrities are idolised by the masses and you can’t deny that Prince is a legend; but why on earth does he need his entire dressing room wrapped in cling-film before he enters it? Amongst his many other demands include an oxygen bar and a black M&M’s machine. Barbara Streisand, a legend too, demands that she has rose petals in her toilet. Madonna needs a new toilet seat and 25 cases of Kabbalah water – the toilet seat will probably come in handy should she try to drink all that water!

Most celebrity demands are fairly normal though, with dressing room demands limited to alcohol and food, after all if they can get it – why not have it? In an age when being on the A-List means you can get anything you want, we’d probably all try and get as much as we possibly could and if that means getting someone to dump our boyfriends for us – we’d quite happily demand one!

Finally, we want to draw your attention to one celebrity who isn’t fazed by being a celebrity at all, there are no demands for tons of booze or vast amounts of candles, all he requests is that a life sized cardboard cut-out of himself is present in his dressing room. It’s nice to know some of us are normal isn’t it?

By: Heather-16825

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Heather is the chief celebrity gossip writer for Mecca Bingo.

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Tabloids Must Be Free to Offend

Peter Preston: You have to be pretty oblivious of history, and market reality, to believe that kiss-and-tell tales are not a formidable sales aid

On Monday 4 May 1896, Alfred Harmsworth published his first Daily Mail. Now see how what goes around comes around. Harmsworth’s triumph was inventing a paper that appealed to a totally new, young audience – ‘by office boys, for office boys’ sniffed Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. It wasn’t elitist. It was avowedly popular and populist, with sales figures to match.

On 9 November 2008, the editor of that same, continuing Mail, Paul Dacre, stayed true to tradition. He belaboured one judge for some very odd (privacy) judgments and he produced an argument Harmsworth would have saluted. ‘If mass-circulation newspapers, which also devote considerable space to reporting and analysis of public affairs, don’t have the freedom to write about scandal, I doubt whether they will retain their mass circulations – with obvious and worrying implications for the democratic process,’ he told the Society of Editors.

It’s a case you can put in different ways. ‘To keep this squalid industry afloat, unrestricted right to publicise the sex lives of others is necessary, so the judiciary must be silenced’ (Max Mosley, writing in the Guardian). Alternatively, try Lord Woolf in the Appeal Court in 2002: ‘The courts must not ignore the fact that if newspapers do not publish information the public is interested in, then there will be fewer newspapers published, which will not be in the public interest.’ It is also an argument deserving very serious attention.

The danger – amply demonstrated as the ineffable Mosley strides stage centre yet again – is that any debate becomes simply a matter of whether you love or loathe the Mail or News of the World: queues of moralising bloggers and flagellating columnists duly form. But Dacre’s speech, which was mostly about threats to press freedom, delivered by an editor who devotes much time and effort to that cause, deserves something better.

Is it true, as he asserts, that the press in France is weak, feeble and subsidised because of French privacy law? Is it true that America’s newspapers are plunging so far, so fast, because they’re too keen on their righteous self-image to ditch enough dirt? Very little of this, in fact, has anything to do with European or other human rights law. It’s more about national attitudes, traditions and geography.

Who can argue with a straight face that President Barack Obama will rule a failing democracy because the New York Times doesn’t put Britney Spears on its front page? And Europe’s most dynamic and innovative tabloids (conventions of human rights or not) currently come to newsstands across the EU courtesy of Axel Springer’s Berlin HQ.

But that, in British terms, doesn’t mean Dacre has got it all wrong. The ABC circulation report for October shows that 5.6 million bought a redtop – Mirror, Sun, Sport, Star or Record – every day. Add in the Mail and Express, and that swells to 8.5 million. The Mail alone (2.2 million) sells more copies than the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent combined. Would 8.5 million wither away without S for scandal? Not entirely: but you have to be pretty oblivious of history, and market reality, to believe that kiss-and-tell tales and celebrity gossip are not a formidable sales aid. (See them sweep through Heat/Closer/Nuts/OK magazine shelves and pour into the internet – one reason why mere newspapers are taking a hit.)

There’s money at stake here, to be sure, but there’s also something else. The right of the public – broadly, not narrowly, defined; Joe as well as Polly Public – to have the news they want in the way they want it. And those who seek to deny that right automatically join hands with Salisbury on the first Daily Mail so long ago.

They say that only sentient, refined people like us – like me, like Max Mosley – should have newspapers that match their interests. They prescribe the morals and mores of the nation in terms of themselves and their own constituency of chums. Their ideals don’t extend to trusting the people to pick and choose (so seven million Mail readers are cast into outer space). They don’t seem to realise that the initial success of the Sun was built on providing news, views and nipples for those with a reading age below anything Fleet Street then acknowledged or catered for, but who promptly bought the Bun in their millions, daily readers for the first time.

Elitism is the curse of bad government and a struggling democracy. Press freedom inevitably includes the right to get up people’s noses, or the opportunity to observe the president of world motor racing at play. (Why didn’t he sue for libel before a jury of 12 good men and true, rather than beat a privacy path to Judge Eady alone?) Of course, free doesn’t mean free-for-all. Of course there are standards and shocking blunders, by the News of the World among many others, but news itself isn’t a commodity for prim definition or sniffy rationing. It’s more important than that.

Which, time travelling back to 1896, makes you wonder what young Alfred the subsequently Great would have made of Saint Paul 2008 on the BBC and Ross-Brand. Would Harmsworth have BBC-bashed away over Andrew Sachs? Would he have warmed to Dacre’s praise for Radio Four? No, busy founding the Mail (and the Mirror), he’d have served up something for punters everywhere. And, whether you like it or not, quite right, too.

Appear for the defence, m’lud

Which was more shocking then: Paul Dacre’s attack on the no-win-no-fee balloon of libel costs, with distinguished QCs on 7,000 a day, or his direct onslaught on Judge David Eady, who seems to hear so many of these cases?

Enter (via a letter to the Times, naturally) four of Britain’s most distinguished libel silks. Dacre’s attack ‘cannot go unanswered’, they say; but since, ‘by convention’, Eady has to keep mum, they’ll answer for him.

Fine; indeed, very comradely. But will nobody equally now jump to defend m’learned friends on 7,000 a day? Perhaps, with or without convention, Eady himself might rally to their flag?

© Guardian News & Media 2008 Published: 11/15/2008

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The best way to keep in Touch with Celebrities

Celebrity News as it happens, when it happens.

This is a great magazine for those who are interested in celebrity news. There are lots of photos, articles, and not too many ads. In Touch is the perfect weekly magazine devoted entirely to the world of celebrity for the on-the-go reader. It’s packed with the latest celebrity gossip, stunning photos and fashion, plus articles that touch the heart. From the exclusive celebrity articles to the fashion, this magazine is always up-to-date and keeps you informed on the hottest news items and fashion trends today. In Touch magazine is the new magazine on the block and blows the others out of the water. It is very thick and has tons of articles and pics.

There is something in it for everyone. The thing i like most about this magazine is all the stories inside. There are the same pictures you will find everywhere else but there are a lot of short articles that you can read rather than many five page articles. If there is something going on in the celebrity world, In Touch will have it in their pages. The articles are great for keeping informed and glancing through for pictures.

In Touch magazine most closely relates to US Weekly and People. Of these three magazines, In Touch has the best quality and quantity of photographs. Other magazines that write about similar topics are outrageously priced and their articles are misleading and you never learn anything of actual relevance to the topics on the cover. In Touch keeps you "in touch" with celebrities and their important/interesting stories happening week to week with their lives.

In Touch always stays a safe distance from celebs personal lives and do not cross the line with their articles and no matter who or what article is being written In Touch keeps up a respectful and tasteful point of view about the subject/celebrity at hand. And they also talk about important things in the public eye. Yes it is celeb orientated magazine but the articles are of wide ranges of interest and topics to do with the celeb world and also non celeb world.

This magazine gives you more info than if you knew the stars personally and were up close and personal with their lives. According to popular opinion "other mags dish it out", but sometimes I wonder if some of there stories are just that- STORIES! It seems like they spread it on pretty thick at times just to sell a cover. I don’t get that with IN TOUCH. It doesn’t bother me in the least to sit down on a Friday or Saturday night, when the family is winding down, and read this book cover to cover, knowing that my teenage girls are just as much movie buffs as I am, and they will want to know a tidbit of information on their favorites.

If you are after serious magazines go get Time or something else. If you just want some weekly eye candy about the multitude of overpaid celebs than this is the way to go. In Touch is like one of those bakery brownies that looks so good in the case, that you start wondering whether it would taste as great too. But once you take a bit into it you cant stop craving more.

In Touch Magazine subscriptions
In Touch Magazine subscriptions

By maalik khan Published: 9/29/2008

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British Tabloids

British Tabloids provide their readers a heady concoction of gossip, entertainment and news.

A rather infamous counterpart of the British Press, the British tabloids are all about making the daily dose of news simpler, colorful and off course sensational. Although the tabloids in most countries have a tendency to splash the tabloid pages with celebrity news, an interesting feature of the British Tabloids is making sensational celebrities out of every mundane news be it politics, sports, business or the never failing sensational news source – the good ol entertainment.

Classification of British Tabloids

Red Top British TabloidsRed Top British Tabloids are tabloid newspapers in the United Kingdom that generally have red mastheads. Red top tabloids generally signify a more sensational style of journalism and perhaps that is indicated by the use if color red in the masthead of the newspaper.

Black Top British TabloidsBlack Top British Tabloids are tabloid newspapers in the United Kingdom that are marked with a black masthead. Generally the Blacktop tabloids are considered a less sensational and more serious form of the British press. The Black color differentiated these tabloids from the sensational Redtop tabloids.

Reasons for the Success of British Tabloids

No matter how many people point fingers and frown upon the British tabloids it is a fact that the British Tabloids are popular and successful. There is a demand for compact news dose with minimum and peppy text and eye-catching pictures and the British tabloids are giving the readers just that. Here are some of the reasons the British Tabloids are alive and kickin…

British Tabloids: Combating the New Media Wisely
Print media all over the world is facing serious competition from the new media be it the Internet or Television and no one is geared up for the competition better than the tabloids. The New media has the power to supplant the print, and hence the tabloids have achieved what the mainstream broadsheets are still struggling with – creating a readership niche. Also most of the British tabloids have embraced the new media instead of competing with them and hence have their e-versions or online editions of their daily tabloid editions.

British Tabloids: Getting the Format Right
The British Tabloids have maintained a compact format, which is rather convenient for the reader to pick up, read and carry as well. The text is minimum and is supplemented with appropriate pictures. The entire format stresses more on the visual appeal rather than the textual content.

British Tabloids: No Hypocrisy
Yes, the British Tabloids wear the sensationalism tag with pride and accept that they are profit driven and aim for good business at the end of the day. The readers want sensational news, the tabloids give them just that – hot sensational news garnished with a lot of spice and dollops of entertainment. British Tabloids do not compete with the serious broadsheets instead; they have carved a niche for themselves. They have their own readership segment that is large enough to keep them going in the business as well.

Prominent British Tabloids

The Sun
Launched in: September 15, 1964
Owned by: News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch)
Readership:3.126.866 copies daily (As of October 2007)
Masthead: Red-top Tabloid

The Sun is perhaps the most popular tabloids that is published in the United Kingdom as well the Republic of Ireland. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the Sun has the highest circulation of any English daily newspaper with as many as 3.126.866 copies daily in October 2007. Some of the Regular interesting features include the Page Three Girl which is highly criticized for being rather pornographic. The Paparazzi pictures are commonly featured on the front page. Although the Sun heavily banks on celebrity news from several fields, gossip concerning the British monarchy and soap opera storylines for its content, the British tabloid features serious news stories about issues like domestic abuse, pedophiles and security scandals.

The Daily Mail
Launched in:1896
Owned by:Daily Mail and General Trust PLC
Readership:2,400,143 ( As of 2007)
Masthead Black-top Tabloid

Originally started as a broadsheet in 1896, The Daily Mail switched to the tabloid format in 1971. The Daily Mail, Britain’s oldest tabloid is not only the second biggest selling daily newspaper but it also has the 12th-largest circulation in the world among English-language dailies. It is a black top tabloid, which introduced a Sunday title in 1982 that was known as the Mail on Sunday. As of October 2007 the circulation figures by the Audited Bureau of Circulations show gross sales of 2,400,143 for the Daily Mail which is an increase of one third over the sales figures 25 years ago, when it sold 1.87 million copies a day.

The Daily Mirror
Launch Date:1903
Owned by:Trinity Mirror PLC
Masthead: Red-top Tabloid

Popularly referred to as ‘The Mirror", this consistently left-of-center tabloid was launched in 1903. The tabloid was supposed to be a newspaper for women and run by women. Alfred Harmsworth who originally started the newspaper had been quotes saying that, ""I intend it to be really a mirror of feminine life as well on its grave as on its lighter sides…. to be entertaining without being frivolous, and serious without being dull". Back in the 1970s, the Sun surpassed the Mirror’s circulation and declining circulation has plagued it since then.

The People
Owned by: Trinity Mirror PLC

‘The People’ is a British tabloid that is published only on Sundays. The Trinity Mirror group that also runs the Daily Mirror owns this tabloid. This tabloid also banks chiefly on celebrity news and scandals. Although it claims to be a competitor to The News of the World, it has a rather unimpressive circulation of less than one million as compared to the 3,445,459 copies per week sales of its competitor The News of the World. It is reported that the tabloid has suffered financial damages due to the cost cutting strategy in the year 2006.

The Daily Star
Launch Date:1978
Owned by: the Express Newspapers
Readership: 770,000
Masthead Red top tabloid

Published in 1978, the Daily Star was purportedly the first national daily in Britain after the launch of the Daily Mirror. This British tabloid is published by the Express Newspapers group, which also owns the Daily Express and Sunday Express. Like other redtop British tabloids, the Daily Star also features celebrity news, gossip and entertainment based features as its major content. Just like the British tabloid ‘The Sun’, this tabloid features a topless model on weekdays. These models are referred to as the ‘Starbabes’.

The Daily Express
Launched in:1900
Owned by: Express Newspapers
Readership:761,637
Masthead Black-top Tabloid

The Daily Express is another conservative middle-market black top British Tabloid. Owned by the Express Newspapers group, the tabloid was started in 1900 as a broadsheet with gossip and the crossword puzzle, this newspaper switched to the tabloid format in 1977. The Daily Mail remains to be its biggest rival. The front page of this British Tabloid describes itself with a tagline that says "The World’s Greatest Newspaper." According to the figures from the Audited Bureau of Circulations in 2007, the Daily Express has a circulation of 761,637, which is a 60% decline since 1982 when it sold over two million copies a day.

News of the World
Launched in:1843
Owned by: News Group ( that is a branch of Murdoch’s News Corporation)
Readership:3,445,459 copies per week (As of 2006)

News of the World is a Sunday-only British tabloid published by News Group Newspapers that is a branch of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Published in 1843 by John Brown Bell, the newspaper soon established itself as the most widely read Sunday newspaper. Although the newspaper tends to focus on celebrity-based scoops and populist news, its constant interest and showcasing of sex scandals has gained it the nicknames like Sex ‘n’ Scandal weekly or News of the Screws and even Screws of the World. News of the World boasts of excellent sales records with an average of 3,445,459 copies per week in October 2006.

Metro
Launched in:1999
Owned by: Associated Newspapers
Readership 1.7 Million (As of the figures in 2005)

Metro is a free daily British tabloid published by the Associated Newspapers group, which is available from Monday to Friday on most of the public transport services across the United Kingdom. Launched in 1999, the sales have already crossed the one million mark making it the fourth largest daily newspaper in the United Kingdom. Mainly aimed at the traveling lot, the newspaper has a youthful appeal and is designed to be read in twenty minutes. Metro features a heady concoction of articles ranging from subjects like travel, homes, style, and health to arts and entertainment listings.

Love them, hate them but you just cannot ignore them. British Tabloids speak volumes about the survival of the Print media and serve as an excellent example of a successful; business model in the mass communication industry by creating a niche for themselves. There exist a section of readers who would prefer a newspaper that could be picked up in their busy schedules and will serve as some quality light reading. It’s like having different tastes in books, and tabloids symbolize pulp fiction – If you find them blasphemous, suit yourself!

By Uttara Manohar Published: 1/10/2008

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Why are we unable to resist Gossip?

As soon as the magazines and tabloids reach our hands most of us rush to the gossips section and the news tidbits about the celebrities. What are we trying to learn by reading the celebrity gossips section? Why do people go crazy about celebrity news?

It is not to get great insights into life we go onto read the gossips section. One of the reasons why we are crazy about celebrity gossips, why we cannot resist celebrity gossips is that we adore our celebrities so much and we would like to know every thing that is happening in their lives. We like to know whom they are going out with, what they have for breakfast on Wednesday mornings and even things which are really not newsworthy. For most of us they are our role models and we try to imitate them in our lives, both the good and the bad. Probably we try to imitate them because we unconsciously believe that we too can be successful when we imitate their life.

If we observed our own obsession about celebrity gossips we will notice that we are not keen in knowing about every celebrity; we would like to know only about certain people and we follow the news items about their lives very closely. When it comes to gossips about other celebrities we do read them but we do not talk about them so much or give great importance to them.

Moreover, different people have different reasons for their interest in gossips. Ordinary people are interested in gossips because they try to imitate someone in their life and anything related to that personality is of interest to them or they just read it for time pass. For others who consider the celebrity as their competitor, gossips are their heaven sent chances to spoil their reputation and to steal their place. For media people, gossips are their chances to mint money. So different people love gossips for different reasons and all of them in someway or the other try to know about the celebrity who is being spoken about.

A business or financial magazine will not be interested in what Britney Spears wore for her dinner with her new date unless they can relate that news to some business news that will benefit their audience. So, it is a relative interest that depends totally on the reference point of the person that receives the news. There are very few people who will be interested in every celebrity’s gossip stories whereas others are rather more selective.

However, there is nothing wrong in reading these gossip stories or commenting about them as long as we are not spreading all wrong news about a person which will hurt their feelings or affect their life in some way. Moreover, the celebrities themselves often do not mind about gossips because often they become popular through these gossips. What is more important is how we are allowing these gossips to affect us or influence our life.

If you love celebrity gossips then Bilibr.com is the place for you, because here you can get to know the latest celebrity gossips before anyone else knows.

By: David8 Simpson8

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Ivanka Ford is author of this article on celebs breaking news . Find more information about celebrities gossip here.

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Why Are We So Obsessed with Celebrities?

Americans are living in an ever-increasing virtual version of life. Is this why celebrities seem more real to us than our own family and friends?

By Anastacia Mott Austin

Come on, admit it. Unless you’ve been pushing up daisies for the last several months, you know all about what has been happening with Paris Hilton. It’s nothing to be ashamed of – in fact, coverage of the trials and tribulations of Ms. Hilton have been inescapable. One literally cannot get away from the coverage of her life, seen in American news outlets as the most important news of the day, trumping trade relations, looming nuclear tensions between countries, political drama, you name it.

And while you’ll find no shortage of folks bemoaning that very fact, the truth is that whenever celebrity "news" is broadcast, there are far more viewers or readers than for any other topic. Approximately 7 million celebrity gossip magazines are sold weekly.

Why? What is it about the bigger-than-life actions of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie or Lindsay Lohan or Nicole Richie, et al., that make it so compelling for Americans to drop everything and tune in?

First of all, they’re always there. With our ever-increasing access by virtual means into the lives of just about anyone, celebrities’ every move is recorded and broadcast into our homes as if we were right there with them. Privacy isn’t what it used to be, so it’s easy to feel that we know all about the lives of Nick and Jessica, Kate and Tom, Posh and Becks. "There is a sense of entitlement to celebrity lives," said Marc Lamont Hill, assistant professor of Urban Education at Temple University, to reporters. "That all feeds the celebrity frenzy."

They’re just like us – only better. They’re richer, shinier, more beautiful versions of ourselves. With all of the fancy dress-up occasions and flashbulbs popping like crazy on the red carpet, it’s like the prom every day. The overwhelming media attention given them informs us that they are what we want to be.

Media moguls will tell you that they are only responding to public demand, though it’s a chicken-and-egg argument. Are we watching because the rich and famous are always in front of us, or are they followed because the public demands information about them?

With all of our instant access and supposed need for more and more "stuff" of the this-minute variety, we’re suffering from a low-level cultural depression. If we buy this or that product, maybe it will turn us into someone special. "The notoriety of the entertainer and the almost religious fervor of their most dedicated adherents is a symptom of self-imposed dissatisfaction with one’s own predicament," writes Makena Walsh, runner-up of the Textbookx.com’s fall 2006 essay contest about celebrity obsession. "Star-worship is a religion of self-deception, one requiring its participants to continually deceive themselves into believing the next product they purchase will be the capstone on their hodgepodge of useless materials, enabling them to finally start living a meaningful existence."

Star-gazing as a quest for the meaning of life? Maybe. It seems like a stretch, but experts on generational social trends say that the young people coming of age now – Generation Y (or is it Z by now?) – feel that fame is the most important thing in life, like, ever.

"Kids see fame as a cure-all for problems," said Jake Halpern to reporters. Halpern is the author of the book, Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction. "Fame is an attractive fix-it."

And whereas previous generations may have been interested in the so-called fabulous life of celebrities, the difference is that kids today believe fame is achievable. With reality shows and Youtube showcasing the lives of the mundane masses and creating instant fame for those who have no reason to be famous, there is the belief that someday soon, they could actually join the ranks of Brangelina and TomKat. Celebrities are the new in-crowd, and we want to be with the popular kids. The line between reality and fantasy has been blurred to the point that the sometimes unrealistic thinking of teenagers is validated: yes, you can actually enter the television show or video or movie and become real friends with the likes of the famous.

But if we’re so attracted to celebrities because they are supposedly better versions of ourselves, why the rabid rubbernecking when one of them inevitably train-wrecks into rehab? Apparently, that only makes them more accessible to us. "People can relate to their mistakes…" said Janice Min, editor of US Weekly, to reporters. Everyone wants to be sure their gods have clay feet, or they seem less like real humans. Total perfection is worse than off-putting; it’s boring.

An ironic twist to celebrity obsession is that the motivation for following the lives of the famous – boredom, dissatisfaction, or loneliness in one’s non-virtual, real life – often leads to increased isolation from the real world. To some, the troubles of Anna Nicole Smith seem more real to them than their own mundane lives, and by becoming overly involved with the lives of the famous, they lose touch with their actual community. "We know everything about these phantom friends – Britney and Nicole and American Idol rejects – at the expense of archiving our own personal history," said writer Jancee Dunn on Salon.com.

Agrees Harvey Levin, from TMZ.com, the know-everything spot for celebrity information on the web. In an interview with Dateline in February of this year, Levin decried the fascination with celebrity lives, even while admitting that he makes his living reporting on it.

"Now, we get everything we always wanted to know…and so much more. And all of it’s a sad, painful, and sometimes embarrassing lesson about our stars, ourselves, and the vapor trail of celebrity."

By Buzzle Staff and Agencies Published: 7/4/2007

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Everyday new celebrity gossip stories hit the front pages of the entertainment sites but how does one separate the truth from fiction? Of the popular news media outlets some of the more established like People Magazine, tend to be more reliable sources, confirming stories as much as possible before publishing. This tends to make these outlets trusted sources but at the same time often slow to come out with controversial news that’s harder to confirm and that might cause backlash. After all if a story reflects poorly on a celebrity, they and their reps are not likely to confirm and may in fact blatantly deny until totally cornered. They may also be reluctant to co-operate with that media outlet in the future.

There are also many media outlets that are more daring and will go forward with publishing a story pretty readily if they believe it’s based on truth, even if the gossip is based on circumstantial evidence. These types of stories require the most detective work to weigh the validity of the story. New couple alerts are a good example. Celebrities are often spotted ‘looking cozy’ together all the time. Sometimes these types of stories have some supporting photo evidence, other times it’s based on hearsay third party witnesses. Many times these stories are just planted by reps. and the celebrities themselves for publicity purposes. Jennifer Aniston is forever being linked to every leading man she works with, especially since her splitting from Brad Pitt. Fans want to see Jen find love again and tabloids are anxious to deliver to sell magazines. Two thirds of those stories or more are false of course. When Jen was initially linked with John Mayer, frankly I was skeptical. The funny/sad thing was, when Jen broke up with Mayer, she was immediately linked with another hot new guy. This rumor which should have made anyone highly skeptical soon proved to be false but that’s the nature of this business. Without going into a whole manifesto here, another type of story example that’s usually hard to get confirmation on is celebrities stricken with health issues. It was ‘The National Enquirer’ that broke the news on the Patrick Swayze cancer story, which was confirmed by his rep. after the actor was ‘outed’. Meanwhile stories like, Paul Newman’s alleged battle with cancer has never been officially confirmed.
Many gossip news outlets fall into a third category. Seemingly under the gun to crank out new articles,they throw in a few ‘trash gossip’ stories in the mix of each publication. Most of these fiction based stories are not malicous, and based on some shred of truth, that I call ‘progression stories’. A celebrity dating the same person for a while, is reported to be, breaking up, cheating or planning their wedding. A celebrity known to drink, is going to rehab. A celebrity is photographed with a new ring, there engaged. A couple weeks before Jennifer Aniston split up with John Mayer she appeared on two magazine covers on the same week. One reporting she was planning her wedding, the second saying she was already making plans to have a baby.

My biggest pet peeves in the truth and lies game is twofold:

Media outlets and websites that deliberately publish malicious ‘false stories’ for the sake of publicity. Many of these stories capitalizing on celebrities misfortunes and are attention grabbing but often based on nothing more then conjecture or just imagination. A recent trash story, that had my blood boiling, claimed that Christina Applegate was going to put off treatment for breast cancer so she could have a baby! The tabloid picked up on the fact that: ‘Christina told an interviewer that she didn’t want to wait until her mid-forties to have a baby, and that her biological clock was ticking.’We learned 5 days later that Christina Applegate had already had a double mastectomy performed to remove the cancer.

Likewise media outlets that turn their back on certain types of stories because they don’t want to get their hands dirty or offend their audience. Recently the NY Post’s famous Page Six published under their ‘blind items’:
‘Which hunk in a summer movie is a violent, closeted homosexual? The heartthrob snuck into his ex’s apartment a few months ago and raped him so violently, the ex ended up in the hospital – and the actor paid him $500,000 to keep his mouth shut.’
Well I guess you can see why they might be a bit reluctant to name, names. It’s not unusual for one of these blind items, which are posted frequently to eventually be reported with names by more daring publishers.

By: SGBroadband.com

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Hot Momma Celebrity Gossip dishes the dirt on all your celebrity favorites. Keeping you informed about what’s going on in Hollywood with tongue in cheek humor and style. Author: Barry Trute Published on: www.hotmommagossip.com For Movie News: www.hotmommagossip.com/category/movie-news/

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