I’ve slowly weaned myself off of most of my dirty gossip blogs. Last year at this time (when I was still with movies.com) I was subscribed to about 20 different gossip sites, which was definitely too many since very few of them post original content. My RSS reader was often filled with updates from 10 different sites all giving their own supposedly funny snarky takes on the same celebrity pictures. It got tiresome, and when I quit my entertainment job I was relieved to cut back to only a half dozen or so.

This year I’ve continued to cut back. After a brief dirty fling with x17online (surely the most corrupt gossip site out there — run by a paparazzi agency), I just unsubscribed from my second-to-last last guilty pleasure, popsugar.com. It’s a decent gossip site, but the editor seems to be obsessed with Victoria Beckham and the commentary is overly fawning and I started realizing that I wasn’t actually interested in the gossip — what’s actually interesting to me are the PR machinations and media manipulations that go on. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton’s tour de force of labia and partying a couple weeks ago was clearly an orchestrated undertaking, even if it was somewhat sloppily done. Britney wanted some attention, and Paris wanted the joy of looking classy next to this white hot, slightly desperate mess.

Here’s the thing: the gossip blogs still treat the readers as naive; as if we actually believe the entertainment bullshit is real. (Did anyone actually believe Britney and Paris were suddenly friends?) I know gossip isn’t real and I read it all through a weird media-studies lens because I’m genuinely fascinated by the way publicists and celebrities work together to manipulate the media into telling these ridiculous stories, and the ways they try to spin actual news (perhaps bad news) into less bad news.

In other words, I’m not interested in the stories — I’m interested in the storytelling. THAT’S where the fascination rests for me; not in Paris Hilton (seriously: I so don’t care) but in her publicist Elliot Mintz, who’s spun some crazy lies into supposed “news.” Paris Hilton’s family hired a PR team when she was in high school. That’s why she’s famous — PR people crafted a story and fed it to the media and made her famous. They invented a story, and made people care about a woman who really doesn’t do anything. Now THAT’S interesting. Paris Hilton? Not so interesting.

When I was reading x17online (which seriously made me feel dirty), I was more fascinated by the behavior of the paparazzi than the behavior of the stars. How did they get that labia shot of Britney, you may wonder? Well, if you watch one of x17’s videos, you can see photographers reach their cameras down to the sidewalk as Britney gets into Paris’ car. (Note: I hate linking to their site and giving them traffic, but the video is really somethin’ else.) You hear Paris say, “Guys, don’t be perverts.” Seriously, the video is infinitely more interesting in terms of paparazzi techniques than it is about either of the blond starlets it was supposedly featuring.

This is all to say, if anyone knows of a media-savvy meta-gossip blog that covers the storytelling (publicists, paparazzi, entertainment journalists, etc) instead of the stories, please let me know. While defamer gets close to this kind of meta-entertainment industry perspective, I’d inhale a meta-gossip blog, if such a thing existed.