Online Gossip Sources Are More Than Happy to Feed the Dish

Are Madonna and John Travolta going to be evil-doers in the next Batman flick? Are Gywneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt planning a secret wedding? Is a popular sitcom star gay? These are just some of the rumors swirling on the Web, a hotbed for celebrity gossip. While Pierre Salinger and others have been tricked into believing what they read online, it’s better to take everything with a whopping grain of salt and enjoy the dish. Lots of it. Search engine Yahoo! lists about 20 gossip-related sites, but dirt can be dug up at a variety of entertainment sites, plus forwarded e-mail and usenet lists that bring the latest juicy tidbit to you in nanoseconds.

You might want to start with the established voices of gossip like Rush & Malloy of the New York Daily News (https://www.mostnewyork.com) or Liz Smith of Newsday (https://www.newsday.com) (The Times runs a portion of Smith’s column). Since they write for mainstream papers, don’t expect too many offensive rumors, though those writers might get exclusives.

The best gossip package comes courtesy of E!Online (https://www.eonline.com), which mixes comedy and celeb interaction with columns from Ted Casablanca and Ben Stein. The comedy is at the expense of Madonna in the often hilarious “Diary of Madonna’s Baby,” with reports on Uncle Dennis, Auntie Rosie, Poppi and various rants from Mommy. The site’s interaction includes stars answering (mostly) softball questions e-mailed from fans and some freewheeling discussion boards. The real gossip comes from vet Casablanca’s “The Awful Truth” (he’s the one who outed the TV star).

If you’re looking for TV dirt, check out the Daily Dish at TV Guide’s online home (https://www.tvguide.com). A bit tamer than E!, the Dish did serve up an interesting bit on photographer Herb Ritts trying to avoid credit for “Batman” promo shots. More lively still is Gist (https://www.gist.com), an independent TV source, with a gossip section called “The Gab,” which was quick on the uptake about “Sliders” moving from Fox to the Sci-Fi Channel.

Movie hounds have a variety of online sources, but two of the best are the Daily Digest by Doris T (https://www.pkbaseline.com) and John Austin’s HollywoodInside (https://www.ez2.net/hollywood/hinside.html). Austin broke the story about future “Batman Triumphant” stars Madonna and Travolta, and his syndicated dirt can be had by e-mail or fax, too. Doris T (for Toumarkine) made the jump online from the Hollywood Reporter and, along with E!’s Casablanca, shows online gossip’s growing expertise.

Adam Curry, an old-school MTV VJ, has one of the longest-running online columns called CyberSleaze (https://www.metaverse.com). Though it’s updated every weekday and runs on and on--Curry couldn’t be doing it alone--most of the juicy stuff is music-related. Still, CyberSleaze came up with the zany notion that Paltrow and Pitt were only saying they’d broken up to throw media off the track for an imminent wedding. An apology followed after Pitt said it was a “sick” idea.

For hard-core tattlers, there’s Hot Hollywood Gossip (https://members.aol.com/editorman/gossip.html), a self-started newsletter you get by e-mail from Steve Gordon. Gordon simply retells tidbits from tabloids, then gives his own wacky conclusions. Recent items include Heather Locklear getting “butt padding” surgery and Alicia Silverstone needing to get greased into her Bat-costume. Even more out there is the infamous https://alt.showbiz.gossip usenet group. It includes a wonderfully irreverent anti-FAQ (https://www.rt66.com/ ~nlopez/afaq.htm), with dozens of people weighing in on Hollywood’s biggest gerbil . . . er, fish stories.

Mark Glaser is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and critic. You can reach him at McGlaze@aol.com