How the gossip column hijacked the news

By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine

Do you want to know a secret?

The death of Nigel Dempster robs the media of the doyen of the gossip column. But in this increasingly celebrity-obsessed world has the "gossip-isation" of the news rendered the columns redundant?

We've always had a secret passion for gossip.

The first issue of the Times newspaper, then called the Daily Universal Register, carried a letter complaining that "the destroyers of reputation, and feeders on calumny, have sometimes been fully gratified in certain prints which may be termed 'Schools of Scandal'".

At the same time, French pamphleteers were offering scurrilous and fantastical details of Marie Antoinette's sex life. And in the 200 years since, gossip has gone from back-street surreptitiousness to front-page dominance, with the late Nigel Dempster credited as having revolutionised its status in British newspapers.

You get to go to all these parties, but the great secret is that 99% of them are absolutely dreadful Hugo Rifkind Times diary columnist

The gossip or diary story is a unique animal, traditionally uncomfortable in the main pages of the newspaper.

If a film star shouted at a traffic warden, or the chancellor sneezed in the Peruvian ambassador's soup at a state dinner, these might be diary items. Gossip, often worryingly accurate, about the ailing state of marriages amongst celebrities and minor aristocracy, were the bread and butter of Dempster's column.

Hugo Rifkind, who writes the People diary in the Times, and has also penned a novel, Overexposure, set in the world of gossip journalism, says the diary column is still unique.

World of intrigue

"It can be quite subtle and self-referential. You can go on about how you write the stories, how you get the stories, you can write the whole conversation into the experience."

The diary column allows the ordinary reader access into a world of "star-studded" parties and intrigue, although hardened gossip-peddlers can find the experience wearing.

If you can identify this man you may be a gossip column reader

"You get to go to all these parties. But the great secret is that 99% of them are absolutely dreadful. It's tremendously exciting the first two or three you go to but then you realise it's the same people, the same canapés and the same booze.

"The journalists are pretending to people they are friends, and the [celebrities] are representing that they are just out [for a party] and wouldn't dream of speaking to a diarist, but in fact they are promoting something.

"I go out fairly infrequently myself. I discovered early on that I'm bad at looking people in the eye and then being rude about them."

Founding Daily Mirror 3AM girl, Jessica Callan, whose father Paul was a diarist on the Daily Mail and succeeded by Dempster, says the gossip column still gives the newspaper reader something different that counteracts the glossy view of celebrities.

"You go to a gossip column, it's not on the whole nice stories - it's about someone having a fight with someone else or a celebrity running off with someone's partner. It is a little out of the ordinary. It is the reality of the stars.

Nigel Dempster was regarded as the doyen of the genre

"It's not glamorous. Sometimes, you have to trick your way in."

And Callan, who recently wrote Wicked Whispers, her account of her time on the 3AM pages, says the stars can be cynical in their pursuit of publicity.

"On the whole pretty much, more or less, [they] say anything or allow something to be made up about them. Gossip columnists, celebrities and public relations people all equally need each other."

A classic diary column confection, Callan says, is the celebrity stalker. Stories about said stalker often have little or no basis in fact.

But in the era of starlets showing off their decolletage on the front of journals as august as the Daily Telegraph, and gossipy items throughout most tabloids, one might imagine that the dedicated columns had lost some of their steam.

Dempster predicted Harold Wilson's resignation

The journey has gone from readers of serious newspapers allowing themselves a little peek at a gossip column covering establishment and aristocracy figures to today's situation, where virtually anything goes. Diarists are driven into a world of conveying colour as much as actual titbits of gossips.

"The territory of the diary has shrunk. It has changed it," Rifkind says. "I don't run as story-heavy."

Rifkind says one of the items he was most proud of was the observation that before every major speech, Tony Blair had a tendency to wear the same Olympic tie.

Having changed the face of newspapers, the gossip column may have been driven into a new habitat of colour and quirkiness. But it lives on nevertheless.

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Below is a selection of your comments.

The popularity of gossip comes as no surprise to evolutionary psychologists as there is a common view that gossip is important in establishing and maintaining social groups and may have been important in how language first evolved. When this is considered, it is also no surprise to see how popular Big Brother is - it is a universal social arena where viewers can gossip amongst themselves about all the latest goings-on.
Rick, Newcastle

With 'citizen journalism' and instant messaging/photo upload now in the mainstream, gossip columns are going to have to faster and faster to keep up. I can see gossip by text and RSS feed. And with so many micro- and transitional celebrities, we could do with a classification system so we can prioritise our gossip feed requests. (The Juicy Decimal System?).
Nigel Macarthur, London, England

Sadly for those of us that buy a newspaper to read about news, the growth of gossip column trivia over the years is just further evidence of the newspaper industry becoming increasingly besotted by banal and really quite irrelevant people and events.

Who cares what the daughter of some hotel chain magnet does, or the otherwise talentless sibling of some yesteryear sports personality? The real world has many more interesting, important, educational and thought provoking issues with which to engage newspaper readers.

The world of tabloid jounalism does not make much effort to enrich the lives of everyday people in terms of what is happening in the world around them...even when they do attempt to do so, tabloids mostly print sensationalist articles,often blatently biased and only loosely based on facts...if we are lucky!
Kim Potter, Hungerford

Please talk about the performance, not the performer... whether the person is an actor or musician or a politician or a sportsperson, can you not concentrate on whatever it is that brings them into the public eye, not the minutae of their private lives. I am no more interested in hearing about it than most of them are in having their privacy breached in this way!
Megan, Cheshire UK

I Like many and I mean MANY do not, have never and will never care less what Gossip columnists, celebrates or anyone else does with their private lifes - Please BBC/ITV/Sky stop reporting this pointless rubbish
Adam Christie-Grant

The funny thing is, Kim Potter, that you followed this link with the name "gossip" in it anyway...
Johanna Leube, London

Where have the Carl Bernstein's and the Bob Woodward's of the World gone? Shame.
Daniel James, Norwich