Eleven years ago I enrolled in a journalism post-graduate degree at Glasgow's Strathclyde University. During those nine months, I discovered more faults than benefits in my course. Aside from that, I also developed terribly murderous instincts that materialised in my mind the message "Eliminate!" every time I saw a lecturer who had not a sentimental attachment, but an unhealthy obsession with Oxdown, the useless imaginary town made up by the National Council for the Training of Journalists to torture trainee journalists. I miraculously didn't kill anybody, eventually got an MLitt in Journalism, secretly celebrated the fact that Oxdown was eventually eliminated by the NCTJ in 2006 (proving I was more or less right...) and went on with my life.
Yet while I got on with life, journalism mutated into something else: layout programmes for printed magazines that we were taught at the course became obsolete; audio and video recording devices radically changed and the Internet became a massively huge platform with a stronger presence in our lives.
It became easier to write and publish your thoughts and reach out to a wider audience, but it also became more difficult to find a publication that wasn't suffering from staff layoff and budget cuts.
The rise of the blog (not just in fashion, but in different disciplines, including culture, science and technology) proved that ordinary people with no formal qualification in journalism could produce well-researched and coherent articles and publish them online for free.
Even though it became pretty obvious that a large part of the world population misunderstood "writing" for "posting random thoughts on Facebook/Twitter", as the offer of free features and articles increased, many publications went through a major crisis. To improve their readership quite a few newspapers started asking readers to actively contribute to their sites by sending their own photos in (themes range from chronicling your pets' life to your illness or documenting a catastrophe happening near you...). But now the trend has changed again, switching towards celebrity journalism.
These two words do not refer to writing about celebs, but in enlisting somebody famous to collaborate/write for your magazine/newspaper, hoping to attract in this way more readers.
Despite the job crisis out there, in 2013 Pippa Middleton, the younger sister of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, has been enlisted as a food columnist for Waitrose Kitchen magazine, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, a columnist for The Spectator and "Sport and Social" columnist at The Telegraph. Vogue UK instead recently announced that Kate Moss joined the magazine as contributing fashion editor and that her first shoot will be published in Spring 2014.
While it is undeniable that celebrity journalism has always existed and that there are regular columns supposedly written by famous contributors scattered on different magazines and sites, these two cases are pretty interesting.
Until the beginning of this year Pippa was better known for having a spotlight stealing bottom rather than a beautiful journalistic mind matched with an amazing writing talent, and yet she got more writing gigs in nine months than many qualified journalists may get in three years.
Her latest forays into journalism for the "Sport and Social" column at The Telegraph sound a bit like those series of children's books with the same character as main protagonist of stories that have a didactive purpose and teach basic things about the world while entertaining your little ones. A mix of sport, fun hobbies and party planning, her stories are emotionally flat and portray a world in which titivating a canapé tray is a key skill and the potentially deadly anxiety of contracting a terminal disease, experiencing bereavement, losing your job, your house and other assorted tragedies that happen to ordinary people, simply do not exist. In a nutshell, they could be summarised as "Pippa goes to the flower market", "Pippa goes boxing", "Pippa organises her Spanish-themed birthday party", "Pippa joins the Cirque du Soleil". It's a bit like a socialite version of Peppa Pig, the only difference being a vocal and a slightly longer name in the case of the cartoon character. And while we didn't expect from her anything in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas style, not many of us ever imagined that it was possible to sell to The Spectator a piece entirely based on your fondest memories of sport school days, otherwise we wouldn't have collectively and permanently erased from our brains the entire content of that mind drawer filed as "Useless sport and school memories".
Then there is Kate Moss. Definitely not your average model, Moss is loved by many fashion designers, editors and photographers, she has style and she is well-connected. Yet one thing is appearing on the cover of a fashion magazine, another is actually working to make the cover happen; one thing is standing in front of a camera, another is standing behind it, respecting deadlines and being part of a team.
Moss guest-edited the December 2005-January 2006 edition of Vogue Paris, but she hasn't consistently edited anything else in the last few years.
In Kate Moss' defence you may argue that also Grace Coddington was a model before starting a career at British Vogue as Junior Editor and then as Photo Editor, and eventually joining American Vogue as Creative Director. Yet Coddington has had a longer career in fashion journalism than in modelling, while for Moss it's the other way round. Besides, Moss may be too attached to other gigs to be an objective fashion editor (think about her collaboration with Topshop and her friendship with certain fashion designers such as Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent).
There were journalists who saw Pippa being enlisted by Vanity Fair as a positive sign: some stated that, if you must know your main subject to write well about it and if Pippa is a socialite, she can write pretty easily about society engagements; others highlighted that she could be used as the proverbial battering ram, meaning that if a magazine hires her and its sales increase, the publication will have more money to offer jobs to more journalists (non celebs!).
Unfortunately it doesn't work like this. First or all, not all socialites can write well about their lives and, though in an article published a few months ago on The New York Times William Sitwell, editorial director of John Brown Media, publisher of Waitrose magazine, stated that sales soared since Pippa started writing for them (stating: “She is a good cook and writer and works very hard,” and adding that she goes into the office once every month or two when they “bash out a few issues” - once every month? Wow, what a commitment...), Pippa's disastrous sales for her party planning book published by Penguin (for which the publishing house paid a reported £400,000 advance...dear oh dear) may prove we are not witnessing Virginia Woolf's second coming.
Second, it is highly unlikely that a celebrity in your staff will automatically generate more paid jobs. We must indeed consider that for each celebrity journalist who is paid a lot of money, there are at least three who are badly paid. Besides, if you hire somebody justifying your choice solely on name recognition grounds (and this can also be applied to stories about celebrities being offered jobs to design capsule collections of garments and accessories or securing lucrative contracts for exclusive "collaborations" with certain brands...) in the long run only those ones already leading a privileged existenced will be able to get certain jobs.
The other point is that this trend for picking famous people with virtually no experience to design a fashion collection or write for a magazine, raises a few key questions: why do ordinary people have to go through university courses, sit through exams and build a portfolio to do these jobs? What makes Pippa more qualified than your average penniless journalism graduate looking for a job?
Yet the most worrrying thing about the celebrity journalism plague is actually the fact that it may be spreading at other levels. In the last few months auctioning internships has become a favourite sport for many companies, with some sites such as Charitybuzz.com auctioning off not just tickets to art and sporting events, but also internships and apprenticeships (yes, the bidding money goes to a charity partner, but you're still paying to do an internship, which is immoral).
In the meantime, Condé Nast recently announced it will be cutting its internship program starting in 2014. Quite a few publishing companies (Condé Nast included) and fashion houses went through a series of problems in the last two years after unpaid internships in the various industries were brought to light.
As a reaction Condé Nast first enforced new regulations about working hours and wages, then last week it announced it was stopping its internship program.
The choice of eliminating internships points at something else - eliminating the chance of getting more experience. Which leads to other questions: is journalism going to mutate again and will the future of writing at certain levels be left in the hands of the rich, the well-connected and the privileged? In the case of fashion journalism, it's only natural to wonder if we will get rid of proper critics in favour of an elite, an exclusive club made of young and hip models, fashion designers and beautiful style icons.
It may be a bit too early to start mourning your journalistic dreams as only time will tell (and, who knows, celeb journalism may instantly become untrendy like yesterday's pink coats...). But you can bet there is one thing all these celebs hired for the most disparate and absurd jobs - from writing about bungee jumping from a bombed bridge in a war zone to designing a trash fashion collection and thinking they have developed the tailoring skills of Giorgio Armani in 10 minutes - and that's managing to survive on a low income and resisting the urge to commit suicide on a daily basis.
Looks like, after all, there are still skills that vapid celebs, socialites and the rich in general will never manage to learn from simple, unassuming and overqualified (yet quite often jobless) people.
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