I’ve always been a sucker for celebrity culture. For as long as I can remember, I’d watch red carpet interviews and reruns of late-night talk shows like it was my day job. I’d thumb through the pages of magazines in grocery store aisles, taking home whichever had my current celebrity fixation on the cover.

Though an undeniably low-brow guilty pleasure, the essence of celebrity journalism appealed to the part of my mind that was curious about these individuals, the desire to understand their creative processes. These interviews pulled back the curtain of these otherwise vague figures and showed that, under all the glitz and glamour, they were just ordinary people.

That’s not to say celebrity journalism of the 2000s was some refined institution.

The maximalist tabloids often resorted to blatant misogyny, body-shaming or airing out these celebrities’ dirty laundry. Some interviews teetered on cruel, accusatory spectacles, using invasive tactics to pry into celebrities’ lives. 

Snappy, attention-grabbing headlines were often favored over factual statements. Any means of keeping the gossip machine running were exhausted, and the celebrity culture of the early 2000s cracked under its own pressure.

With sensationalist celebrity interviews running their course, a cultural gap emerged that social-media-driven journalism rushed to fill. Gone were the days of gaudy tabloids, and thus began the era of YouTube and podcast shows. 

I look particularly to “Hot Ones,” where its host Sean Evans thoroughly researches his guests to ask captivating questions, embracing the approach of Nardwuar — another YouTube journalist known for his well-researched yet eccentric interviewing style. 

Ziwe is another standout interviewer with her sharp humor and cutting questions: She does her homework and never panders to her guests. Amelia Dimoldenberg takes the uncomfortable beats of a typical celebrity interview and comedically stretches them out into an entire 10-minute show in “Chicken Shop Date.” 

But many celebrity interview shows have co-opted these quirky formats and stripped them of their substance. 

I’m not one for implying nacho theft, but Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” and “Therapuss with Jake Shane” take the Zane Lowe approach in affirming the excellence of their guests. They fall into the habit of coddling the interviewee, shielding them from discussing anything critical.  

These influencers-turned-interviewers do little work in digging for meaningful information; most times, they only scratch the surface and give up before they hit gold.  

These podcast interview shows aren’t stand-alone instances: “Call Her Daddy” averages about 10 million listeners per episode, and Jake Shane has garnered over 45 million views on his YouTube channel. And at a time when one in 10 people get their news from podcasts, according to an August Pew Research Center study, it seems especially important to consider the quality of the content they churn out. 

In veering away from ruthless headlines and defamatory stories, we’ve oversteered into complete glaze-fests that lack depth. Though we’ve shifted away from the slanderous nature of tabloids, the celebrity interviews of today still uphold the same principle: that spectacle eclipses authentic journalism in importance. 

If people wrote off celebrity journalism as frivolous during the tabloid era, what new angle does this new era offer to change that perception?  

Once you strip these interviews of their bells and whistles — whether it be game segments or fan interactions — you’re left with dull, one-note conversations. This overcorrection is how we ended up with unbearable watches like GQ’s Sydney Sweeney interview.

Meanwhile, major legacy outlets like The New York Times are seeing an overall decline in print subscriptions and a simultaneous increase in digital subscriptions. The future of journalism is digital; there’s no denying it. 

In this new age, USC is no longer just funneling its students into newsrooms and major broadcast studios; across Los Angeles, it’s feeding into podcast networks and creator-led studios with a strong social media presence. 

If these digital spaces are our new playground for journalism — with 50% of Gen Z receiving their daily news from social media, as found by a 2022 Statista survey — then we should avoid reproducing the same stan-culture-shaped interview styles that already overrun those spaces. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this style of celebrity interviewing should cease to exist. Though she may lean into the fangirl sentimentality, I think what Brittany Broski is doing with “Royal Court” is brilliant. She’ll go from joking with Colman Domingo about fupas to unpacking how he incorporates raw vulnerability into his performance in “Sing Sing” (2023).

A thriving press ecosystem invites a variety of approaches to journalism. We, as both students and the next generation of cultural reporters, owe the field more than these superficial conversations. We should be pioneering a more nuanced form of celebrity journalism, not flattening ourselves into some oversaturated mold once again.