"The public wants entertainment not information."
William Randolph Hearst

THE SENSATIONAL PRISON RELEASE

It was meant to happen under the cover of night, away from the greedy media. But as befits the subject, Paris Hilton's release from prison was anything but discreet – helicopters hovered, cameras rolled, fans screamed in ecstasy. And when the young socialite emerged everyone wondered who would be lucky enough to score the first interview. NBC reportedly offered $1 million for the privilege. But in the end Larry King got 'the scoop.'

Being the first with a celebrity scoop has been the stock and trade of the tabloid magazine business, but only in recent years has that competition spilled over into the traditional news business. Pushed by the surging popularity of entertainment and gossip sites on the Internet, the media landscape is being reshaped by the world of "dish". The ethicists may howl, the columnists complain, but viewers rule and celebrity machine is more than ready to oblige.

THE GOSSIP INDUSTRY

When a Canadian named Stephen G. Clow started Gossip, America's first national weekly tabloid magazine in New York in 1916, he couldn't have imagined the industry that would spawn in his wake.

Today, celebrity culture dominates our daily media and social dialogue. Celebrity is a 24-hour business, fed by nightly entertainment news programs (Entertainment Tonight, STAR!), cable channels devoted to celebrity (E!), the bustling newsstand business of magazines (US, People, Star, The Enquirer) and the millions of web sites that keep vigil ever-hopeful of sellable scandal.

One platform that's accelerating our love affair with celebrity tabloid culture is the web. A study this week found that in the UK, traffic for entertainment sites was outpacing that for standard news. A recent Nielson ratings study found that celebrity news sites are growing by 40 per cent a year. Total web views have actually increased 108 per cent. One of the biggest TMZ.com. But they are not alone.

They've been followed by X17, an established paparazzi agency that now sees the benefits of a celebrity blog. But their daily 'bread and butter' is following celebrities through every nasty twist and turn of their lives. Their biggest money-maker: Britney Spears.

THE GOSSIP QUEEN

We are drowning in celebrity culture and certainly no tabloid topic has been as big as Paris Hilton. Her incarceration– and subsequent release, then re-incarceration and her ultimate release once again–left us submerged knee-deep in the twists and turns of her life.

But to truly get at this world the documentary begins and ends with Paris…Hilton that is. Famous for doing nothing, she is the ultimate manifestation of our obsession with celebrity culture and the massive profits that it wields. As long as we are willing to watch and read, who can resist feeding our habit?