Liz Smith, the columnist, left, chatted with Donna Hanover last week at an event sponsored by Elle Magazine and Mount Holyoke College.

In the Blog Era, Liz Smith Wonders if There's Room for the Pro
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE


Let's dish...

So LIZ SMITH was having dinner with NICOLE KIDMAN at New York's Four Seasons and it seems the actress really likes to pig out.

"Nicole ate the entire bread basket," Ms. Smith said. "Then she said, 'Let's have some of those fabulous fried shrimp.' " Ms. Kidman then plowed through a main course and finished with chocolate cake and ice cream, convincing the gossip columnist that the actress meant it when she said she did not believe in diets.

Okay, pretty tame stuff by today's gossip standards. But the gentle behind-the-scenes glimpse of celebrities is Ms. Smith's stock in trade. And it has helped her survive the increasingly cutthroat business of gossip-writing, an industry that has mushroomed over the last three decades and spawned scores of magazines, television shows, Internet sites and blogs that are consumed with all manner of people-watching and celebrity doings.

In an interview last week, Ms. Smith admitted that the gossip industry has become so pervasive and ruthless that it is difficult to break through with a distinctive voice.

"You can go to so many places now to get the down and dirty, I don't even try," she said. "It's really hard now to get a scoop. With the whole world writing gossip, where is the place for the professional gossip?"

Ms. Smith, who started her career as a columnist at The Daily News in New York in 1976, is now 82 and continues to pump out six columns a week. She has just signed another two-year contract with The New York Post and is in negotiations for another contract with Newsday. Her new book, "Dishing," comes out next month.

Ms. Smith said she was initially reluctant to take the job at The Daily News because, as she told her editors at the time, she thought gossip was dead.

Gossip-writing was a no-go for a time, after the industry collapsed in scandal in the late 1950's. But it got a second wind in the early 1970's with the introduction of People magazine, and now it is flourishing.

But Ms. Smith, who said she believed she was the highest-paid newspaper gossip columnist in the country - she was estimated to be making $1 million in 1998 - said she doubted she would be hired as a new gossip writer today.

Col Allan, editor in chief of The New York Post, agreed that Ms. Smith would have a hard time in today's world.

"It's rare for a successful columnist not to have a mean streak and she doesn't have a mean streak," he said. "These days it would be difficult to carve out a position for yourself without that, partly because people look for it."

Gone are the days when a single powerful columnist could make or break a career. At the height of Walter Winchell's influence in the late 1930's and 1940's, his column was syndicated in more than 2,000 newspapers; Ms. Smith is syndicated in 70 newspapers.

"Franklin Roosevelt used to give him tidbits," Ms. Smith said of Mr. Winchell. "Imagine that! Today, even serious reporters can't get the ear of the president."

Gone too are the days when columnists had individual identities. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who created their own celebrity brands with their trademark chapeaux, have been replaced by interchangeable mass market magazines and faceless blogs.

But what sets Ms. Smith apart is that she doesn't trash her subjects. This helps her maintain access, but it also means her column often lacks the prerequisite of the day: edge.

Jeannette Walls, the purveyor of gossip at MSNBC, said of Ms. Smith: "She made a decision not to be nasty and not to exist on schadenfreude, and that's not a formula that would work today."

Ann Gerhart, who co-wrote The Reliable Source column for The Washington Post from 1995 to 1999, described Ms. Smith's modus operandi this way: "She's friendly with Lauren Bacall, so when Lauren Bacall updates her memoirs, Liz will throw her a bouquet and help boost sales. You have far better access when you're kind to people."

In today's gossip world, being kind is hardly an option. "The Internet and blogs have returned gossip to its earliest human roots - the kind of gossip that the priests told you was a venal sin," said Ms. Gerhart. "You can make it up. You can speculate wildly. You can accuse people of the most taboo practices, all in this sort of merry way."

In this free-for-all, some celebrities are branching into gossip themselves. Rosie O'Donnell, the former talk show host, is writing her own blog. Teri Hatcher, of "Desperate Housewives" on ABC, recently interviewed Ms. Smith for Interview magazine's May issue.

"The world has come full circle," Ms. Smith chuckled. "Anybody can be a gossip."

Publicity agents, too, are less reliant on the gossip columnists, partly because they have so many other outlets. "Press agents used to beg you" to write about their clients, Ms. Smith said. "But now they only want the cover of Vanity Fair or Vogue and they don't much care about being in the gossip columns. Most of the gossip columns have already treated their clients so badly, the agents don't want to serve them in any way. Gossip columnists generally have no conscience."

Leslee Dart, president of the Dart Group, a marketing and public relations agency specializing in the entertainment industry, agreed.

"Columnists now are willing to go further, divulging things that 20 years ago you wouldn't have seen and wouldn't have believed," she said in an interview last week after appearing with Ms. Smith at a forum sponsored by Elle Magazine and Mount Holyoke College.

Because of that, Ms. Dart said, some agents spend their time negotiating with columnists to protect their clients. "I know there are press agents who say to the columnists, 'If you don't write this, then I'll give you so and so,' " Ms. Dart said, adding that that was not her style. "My best advice to a client is that today's newspaper wraps tomorrow's fish. And a week from now or a month from now, we'll find a way of balancing it out.

"If someone's going through a public divorce and they feel the need to put something on the record, Liz will do that. She'll give you the opportunity to speak your mind, and because of that, people are more willing to sit down and tell her what's going on."

This kind of transaction makes Ms. Smith a further anachronism in her profession, where one of the newest entries, in Los Angeles, is a blog called Defamer, a title that almost begs its subjects to take it to court.

David Patrick Columbia, editor of NewYorkSocialDiary.com, a blog that reports on social events and the celebrities and socialites who attend them, said that where Mr. Winchell used his power to destroy people, Ms. Smith used hers to help people, including work on philanthropic projects and to promote literacy.

"She gives away her money," he said. "There are a lot of people whose rent she's paid. When I started my Web site, I hardly knew her, and she asked me if I needed to borrow some money. She asked me three times."

Even back in 1990 when Ms. Smith scooped the world with news of the breakup of Donald and Ivana Trump, she specialized in lending a sympathetic ear. Ms. Smith, then with The Daily News, allied herself with Ivana while Cindy Adams of The New York Post allied herself with Donald, a standoff that further inflamed New York's tabloid wars.

Ms. Smith is now Ms. Adams's colleague on The Post, where their work appears as part of Page Six, a gossip brand name that Mr. Allan, the editor, said was recognized the world over and that thrives even in the age of bloggers. "Page Six survives because people expect original content from it and they get it," he said. "It drives tremendous traffic to our Web site."

Gossip has been a circulation-builder for the tabloids, and advertisers like to appear on Page Six. But while more traditional newspapers have an uneasy relationship with gossip, they have devised their own versions of celebrity columns. Last week, both Richard Leiby, who has written The Reliable Source at The Washington Post since January 2004, and Joyce Wadler, who has written Boldface for The New York Times since 2001, said they were leaving their columns. Mr. Leiby said he was tired of writing ephemera, even though he was widely read.

"What people hunger for is insider, salacious material," Mr. Leiby said. "At The Post, that's a high-wire act. We're beholden here to the two-source rule or direct observation or document-based material."

Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post, said the mainstream press was conflicted over how to handle gossip, even though it was one of the best-read parts of the paper. "We've had more bloody trouble with gossip columns," Mr. Bradlee said. "We deep down in our little constipated souls don't believe in gossip columns."

He said that articles in the 1960's and 1970's by Maxine Cheshire, The Post's long-time society writer, required his endless attention as an editor. "I spent more time with Max than I spent with Woodward and Bernstein," he said.

Ms. Walls, at MSNBC, said that editors had a love-hate relationship with gossip. "It brings in readers and viewers, but you lose credibility," she said. Ms. Walls, who wrote a book called "Dish" in 2000 about the evolution of gossip, said the Internet was "the perfect format" for gossip.

"It's quick and immediate, you can write short, and you can go into it and update it if something happens," she said.

The real-time pace of Internet gossip has made it difficult for newspaper gossip columnists to stay ahead of the curve. Mr. Leiby said that many people in the Post newsroom monitored Wonkette.com, a Washington blog, all day long. "She often has the lead on me because she's in real time," he said.

But Ms. Smith said that the blogs left her cold. She says she reads six newspapers a day, but not the blogs. "I only have a few years left to live, and I don't have time for them," she said. "Besides, I don't believe them."

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- posted by Michael P. Whelan @ 7:41 PM