Are Paparazzi the Future of Newsgathering?

One of my favorite things to write about here is how the media covers Britney Spears. It should be no surprise, then, that today I’ve chosen to write about how the media covers Britney Spears.

David Samuels has a pretty expansive article in this month’s Atlantic where he follows a team of the paparazzi that keep the Britney beat and recounts how modern entertainment news came to be.

While I don’t agree that the paparazzi have become “one of the most powerful and lucrative forces driving the American news-gathering industry,” Samuels points

“…back to March 2002, when a women’s magazine editor named Bonnie Fuller took over a Wenner Media property called Us Weekly, which had drifted along since its founding in 1977 as a rival to the fantastically successful People magazine franchise. What Fuller brought to Us was a keen understanding of her audience. ‘Every day, we’d look at tons of pictures that came in and lay them all out on a conference table,’ Fuller remembers. ‘And what was interesting to me was to look at celebrities going to the dry cleaners and pumping gas. I loved looking at these pictures of celebrities who were just like us.’”

Now celebrity photographers bring in tons of money, but with the focus on celebrities in their normal lives rather than in salacious situations, the paparazzi teams have become larger and more ubiquitous. Also, however, more news agencies have begun buying the pictures. Photo agency X17 rode this trend to the top.

“X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated websites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.”

This has happened in part because exclusives got too expensive:

“The front-of-the-book snapshots in People and Us cost $50,000 to $75,000 per issue, to say nothing of the attention-grabbing exclusive photo-features on Brad and Jen’s divorce or the latest Friends wedding, which averaged in the low-to-mid six figures. When the spending became impossible to sustain, the magazines slashed their photo budgets and stopped buying exclusives. The larger photo agencies like X17 and Bauer-Griffin then found that they could make even more money by selling a single set of pictures 15 or 20 times over, to eight or 10 magazines, five or six television programs, and websites. And so the industrial phase of paparazzi production was born.”

This reminds me of the industrial phase of news production that there’s been some discussion of lately. With local, and even national papers running more and more wire stories, papers are losing their identities. Part of this is because of budget constraints, but also it seems that news has gotten so fast that if you don’t get the story first, it’s not worth getting at all.

TMZ.com editor Harvey Levin has a different opinion, though. From the Atlantic story:

“[TMZ.com] is owned by the giant media conglomerate Time Warner and edited by a pixieish attorney and former TV producer named Harvey Levin. ‘It’s old-fashioned journalism,’ Levin says of the way that celebrity websites gather news. He suggests that the kind of aggressive Web-based coverage that TMZ and other prominent sites have pioneered has obvious applications beyond the world of celebrity, in areas like politics and sports. ‘I see lots of opportunities,’ he says.”

Maybe this divide highlights the difference between photojournalism and reporting. With photos you only get one shot. If you miss it as it happens, you miss the story and you never get a second chance. Writers, however, can go back, find more sources, ask more questions, and get deeper into the story.

The celebrity photojournalism industry has become industrial, with “gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy [doing] the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O,” according to “traditional Hollywood paparazzi.” But are we ready to have print journalism do the same?

Will our demand for fresh news become so immediate that once an event is over it’s considered old news? I hope not. Having time to reflect before publishing a story can do nothing but improve the story.

Photographers envy writers for the time (however short) they have to polish a story, but now those on the front lines are finding that sometimes you do get a second chance:

“X17’s photographers say that Britney Spears frequently comments on the pictures they post on their website. They also suggest that the pop star sometimes goes out a day or two later and restages unflattering shots. ‘Forever, she has been in on the joke,’ says Harvey Levin of TMZ. ‘She has also been severely mentally ill for a while.’”