By By Dane Roberts Wans On
You see them at the check out line in the grocery store or the drug store. Their headlines scream out at you: Read me! Read me! They are your weekly celebrity scandal sheets — the tabloid.
Today’s tabloids are noted for over-the-top sensationalism, the facts of which can easily be called into question. Good tabloid writers do expand upon small news items that appear in the back of traditional papers. Writers may quote “experts” for the story even if the expert has no credentials.
And you wonder to yourself, just who is it who does the writing? How can they lower themselves to that level? What do they do to get the stories? Do they have a life of their own?
All this and more is discussed in the book “Tabloid Prodigy.”
Marlise Elizabeth Kast, in this memoir, attempts to pull us into her world of tabloid reporting for the Globe. Her reporting days for the Globe extended from the death of Princess Diana to the sale of the Globe to the Star. You can ask “What’s a nice girl like you doing writing for a tabloid?”
She attempts to justify her job with her background. She was brought up as the second born in a minister’s family. But as second born she had to prove herself. She got a degree in communications and English from Westmont College, so she is educated. You have to ask yourself then why did she become a tabloid reporter? And she would answer, “It wasn’t as if I intentionally set out to work for one of the lowest forms of media. It just sort of happened.”
This book reads like a diary in places. You can’t tell if she is trying to write an expose or just attempting to use what she learned in class about creative writing. Through it all you sense that Kast is having too much fun.
She has a marvelous cast of characters that she worked with at the Globe. To mention a few: There’s Sharmin, the senior assistant to the bureau chief, Madeline, the Los Angeles bureau chief, Patrick Kincaid, the traveling reporter. And when it comes to the celebrities she writes about, her memoirs seem to be a name dropping exercise.
“Teamwork was nonexistent, and there was little opportunity to get to know one another,” she writes in one passage. She details the hold assignments have on the reporters, sometimes even to the extent of having no down time. “Grab the headline, publish the story, and move on,” she writes in another passage.
There is even the lack of job security. “Madeline would invite a reporter into her office and close the door. One by one we would lower our heads, sensing we were about to lose another soldier from the battlefield. We came to think of the simple act of that closed door as the tabloid guillotine, ready to behead another reporter at any moment.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 31, 2007. Read the original PDF.