News became commercially successful by being reframed as celebrity biography

Evidence

The news, he believed, could and should be told through stories about people—the day’s most interesting and famous personalities. “People just aren’t interesting in the mass,” Luce once explained. “It’s only individuals who are exciting.” And so he launched his new venture based on celebrity, by which he would profit immensely. This is not to say that he had any interest in the merely famous, or what we today might call the “famous for being famous.” The important personalities to his mind were men of great power or other significant achievement. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 755

Categorization

• SEED: The shift from issue-based to personality-based news as an attention-harvesting strategy offers an angle: how celebrity replaced ideology as the organizing unit of public discourse and what that did to democratic attention.
• XREF: Connects to the broader arc of this book on how media industries harvest attention; also parallels later complaints about personality-driven social media politics. — connects to: Gossip media transformed ordinary tech workers into public characters it could cover — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 366