{"id":880,"date":"2008-04-09T09:21:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-09T15:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=880"},"modified":"2008-04-09T09:21:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-09T15:21:00","slug":"snap-judgment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2008\/04\/snap-judgment\/","title":{"rendered":"Snap judgment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n case you wondered exactly how low in the public\u2019s estimation are the people who feed their habit for celebrity photographs<\/span>, an inquest jury has provided the answer.<\/p>\n

They rank alongside drink-drivers who kill their passengers.<\/p>\n

More than 10 years after the event, the British public finally gets to hand out the blame for the death of the most famous woman in the world. The pursuing paparazzi<\/a> and the driver are guilty. The passengers who should have worn their seatbelts are innocent.<\/p>\n

So will this verdict bring an end to hyper-aggressive photography? Hardly. The interval between Diana\u2019s death and the multi-million pound inquest has not seen a falling off in the market for paparazzi pictures.<\/p>\n

The past 10 years has seen the US market finally waking up to the fact that these pictures sell. The one sector of the print media bucking the downward trend in advertising revenue is the celebrity magazine. While traditional news magazines like Time<\/span> and Newsweek<\/span> are losing ad revenue, the celebrity magazines, old and new alike, are piling it on<\/a>. Richard Desmond\u2019s young pretender OK! <\/span>took $45m last year, more than double its 2006 takings. In Touch<\/span> brought in $140m. People<\/span> raked in nearly a billion dollars.<\/p>\n

Those dollars mean quite a market for paparazzi pictures, and that\u2019s without the British and European customers. Diana\u2019s death in Paris was almost incidental to this growth.<\/p>\n

Instead it was Los Angeles, the biggest celebrity city in the world, the entertainment industry town which had broken<\/a> sleaze-peddling magazines like Whisper<\/span> and Confidential<\/span> in the 1950s, that became the centre of the paparazzi trade.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles had managed to keep journalists and photographers at bay until the international market finally broke down the door with the arrival of the British at the start of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Splash, set up by Brits, brought red-top professionalism – or ruthlessness – to Beverly Hills. The money followed. And where the money went, anyone with a big enough lens could follow.<\/p>\n

Last month, one of Splash\u2019s photographers, Nick Stern, quit. Stern told tales<\/a> of a troubled conscience and high-speed car chases, red lights jumped, bumpers bashed – all in pursuit of Britney Spears. He made Mulholland Drive sound like the Pont d\u2019Alma tunnel. (Still, his withdrawal from celebrity photography was temporary – he’s back working for another agency.)<\/p>\n

Bizarrely, celebrities and paparazzi have become so symbiotically entwined in the US public imagination that being pursued down the street by \u201cfaux\u201d photographers has become a part of some American wedding packages<\/a>. Couples are able to share the Hollywood experience of being \u201chosed down.\u201d<\/p>\n

The global market for paparazzi pictures is unlikely to be dented by occasional attacks of self-doubt by the photographers themselves, any more than it is by the verdicts meted out by inquest juries.<\/p>\n

There may be two things that will change it. One is a market in celebrity rights. Along with the rise of the paparazzi has been a rise in the number of stars selling photographic access to their lives. Photos of Lisa Marie Presley\u2019s baby made US$100,000 back in 1989. Today, the price tag for snaps of celebrity children runs to millions.<\/p>\n

If the rights money goes high enough, and the deals brokered get enough riders, then it may well begin to squeeze out the paparazzi.<\/p>\n

Two, the passion for dirt is moving online. And big the money hasn\u2019t followed it there yet. Those factors may work more effectively than a jury\u2019s moral censure.<\/span><\/p>\n

[A version appeared in the Guardian<\/span>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you wondered exactly how low in the public\u2019s estimation are the people who feed their habit for celebrity photographs, an inquest jury has provided the answer. They rank alongside drink-drivers who kill their passengers. More than 10 years after the event, the British public finally gets to hand out the blame for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}