Today you should be in the writing articles phase.
Wednesday you should be working on the overall piece (news site or paper).
Thursday you should be really feeling the progress in the layout.
Friday you should be checking for awesome and errors and sending me an email.
Tabloids are trashy papers.
The focus is on entertainment.
Celebrities are the key to most of them.
Tabloids are between magazines and newspapers.
It’s a cheaper way to make a paper.
The most famous tabloid is, historically, the National Enquirer.
The most tabloid-rich place in the world is England.
One of the richest men in the world got his money from tabloids - Rupert Murdoch. He now owns Fox.
Fox MAKES celebrities and then Murdoch’s other companies tear them down.
A PERFECT ecosystem!
Tabloids build the same system. Build them up, tear them down.
This pattern is designed to self-sustain and to generate ONE THING - AD MONEY.
People buy these because people LOVE to see the rich and famous fall.
There are a couple of tricks to writing one of these articles:
- Sources Say -
- if the reporter uses sources to say that something happened, then the reporter isn’t guilty of lying
- example - “Mexican guy kidnapped and raped by alien women” - this appeared in the Weekly World News - tell me how the reporter got around this obviously ridiculous story - the reporter just asked the Mexican guy (a liar) what happened - then, the reporter talked to a UFO expert (an idiot) and he backed it all up - THEN they sold the story to a bunch of people (morons)
- Mr. Lobb was a bodyguard for martial arts actor Steven Seagal at a Tibetan cultural festival at U of T in Toronto
- Then, I almost sold the story to the Enquirer for 5k, but then, my wife said NO! (because she has morals)
- the Enquirer didn’t and I was greedy, and slightly evil...
- the people who serve celebrities are the perfect people to sell stories about them
- hair dressers, waiters, clothes stores employees, etc...
- IF the celeb is a nasty person, the employee is more likely to want payback + money!
- the sexier and nastier the story or pic, the better the chance it will play
- you get sued for lying if you’re a reporter - the source will not
- the source MAKES the story
- this class of people who serve celebrities will OFTEN have an axe to grind - you might find that celebrities want to be left alone - if the waiter is a pain in the ass, the celeb might be rude - NOW we have a story -
The second way that these stories work is by BUYING stories.
Money is a great motivator for some people - particularly liars
Remember, mixing in a photo and then using the headline and the photo in a trick way is smart - Brad Pitt mid-blink = Brad Pitt is high.
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