Why Celebrity News Is So Popular

We sometimes hear that we live in an age of obsession with celebrity, but the truth is people have been interested in the lives of prominent people for as long as there have been people who were prominent. Even in the Middle Ages, gossip about the activities of the nobility and their court was of widespread interest. However, our modern age has made it easier to enjoy celebrity watching and here's why:

Better Technology

For most of history, following celebrities was mostly a verbal activity in which people in a position to know would share their celebrity news by word of mouth. Now, many more mediums exist for covering celebrities such as newspapers, magazines and video. No longer is celebrity news limited to a grapevine of insiders, today everyone can be a regular consumer of celebrity news through a wide variety of news outlets.

Better Distribution

Once a news outlet has provided something newsworthy about a celebrity, the means now exists for spreading that news faster and further than ever before. The main engine of this news distribution is social media, which allows people to post a celebrity based story before all their social media contacts. The result is a celebrity news echo chamber that brings celebrity news directly to people
who might otherwise not notice it.

Wider Field

Andy Warhol famously predicted that one day "everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes." While we haven't reached that point yet, it is definitely true that the number of people who are considered celebrities has increased. That is partly because there are so many more news outlets hungry for new celebrities to cover, but also because a secondary promotional industry has evolved to promote the celebrities themselves.

The Internet

In the past, celebrity news was limited to only a part of a broadcast or to the supermarket tabloids. With the advent of the World Wide Web, many more celebrity news outlets now exist. The range of coverage has also expanded to cover more fields of celebrity activity beyond Hollywood or sports. If you click here you can see an example of the type of celebrity website that attempts to cover the widest possible range of celebrity news. But whether the celebrities you follow are many or few, we live in an age when celebrity watching has never been more popular or easier to do.