‘We look after our own’: The cultural dynamics of celebrity in a small country

Abstract

Unlike the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, where celebrities are often subjected to derision in the tabloid media, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, the country’s longest-running women’s magazine, respects and values its local celebrities. A content analysis of cover lines on the magazine over the past eight decades reveals that although the magazine has adhered to a steadfast formula of celebrating mothers and wives, there has been a steady shift to a focus on the love lives and scandals of foreign celebrities. More recently, however, the magazine has turned its attention to well-known New Zealanders and developed its own brand of celebrity news.

Gossip at one’s fingertips: Predictors of celebrity news on Twitter

“…For example, the covers of the French society magazine Paris Match featured an increasingly large percentage of French rather than foreign celebrities from 1949 to 2005 (Chenu, 2010). In New Zealand, 80 percent of the top-selling covers of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 2010 were local stars (see Barnes and Olds, 2013).…”

“…Despite the ubiquity and popularity of celebrity culture in social media, celebrity news on social media websites has received little academic attention. The present study builds on previous research on celebrity news on other platforms, such as gossip magazines (Barnes and Olds, 2013; McDonnell, 2011), tabloid newspapers (Gorin and Dubied, 2011), and entertainment websites (Van den Bulck and Claessens, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c), with a new focus on the predictors of celebrity news on Twitter. Furthermore, the present study responds to Turner’s (2010: 19) calls for ‘multi-factoral, conjunctural and multi-disciplinary approaches’ to celebrity studies.…”