Welcome to the Age of Perez Hilton—that time in history when a hotel heiress going to jail trumps war coverage on CNN. These days, it’s all-about-gossip-all-the-time: Gawker Stalker headlines with stories like “Sarah Silverman, W50th & Broadway, Oct. 29 @ 9pm”; the Facebook app “Lindsay Lohan Status” lets users know when the troubled access is “free” from rehab; the blog Bossip keeps the African-American community informed on the latest from legends to D-listers like Steve Urkel (”Did I do thaaattt?”). E! Channel, Entertainment Tonight, Showbiz Tonight, etc. aren’t enough to keep TMZ, the online gossip leader, from debuting it’s own nationally syndicated TV show. US Magazine floods mobile inboxes with breaking news alerts on Suri, the Cruise “alien” baby, and “Zaquisha,” a.k.a. High School Musical star Zach Efron.
As gossip news grows like a weed, Gen Y is getting fodder from a segment it loves more than those ladies in Hollywood: themselves. Sites like CampusGossip.com are giving them their own “invisible audiences” as they become as shameless as Paris. Campus Gossip debuted in early October and allows students to post the latest news about their friends and classmates with Perez-style hype. “I noticed that a large part of my conversations with my friends at school and from home had to do with all of our good stories about our friends and ourselves,” Kevin Tighe, a USC alum and the site’s CEO, tells NGT. “Campus Gossip is a way of linking students all over the country through their stories and experiences.”
Gen Y are all about networks–word of mouth is how they get information–and sordid details are no exception. Any school can contribute to CampusGossip–USC (its birthplace), SMU, Colby, Cal Poly, U. of Florida, LSU, Duke, and Delaware are all on there. It is striving to become a “social resource” where college students can go to find out where to party, what happened the night before, who’s dating whom, and the like. Users with “.edu” addresses can post anonymously, tag and link items, make comments, and rate top “gossip.” A recent poster at USC recently asked, “I know last weekend was nuts in Chicago, I couldn’t make it, wish I could’ve. Someone fill me in so I can live vicariously through you!” Another poster planning his Halloween night wondered, “Is the 9-0 the only thing going off tomorrow night?” Many posts are borderline inappropriate (actually, completely inappropriate), but since when do college kids care about gossip if its PG-13?
Tighe and his team are using Facebook to announce launch parties across the country and create groups supporting the site. They’re also providing PlayboyU Radio—which launched with a corresponding college social network in August—with a weekly segment on the site’s top gossip picks. While CampusGossip is still in its infancy stages, the site has potention : Facebook, for example, expanded rapidly—from Harvard to your mom—once the trend caught on . And what spreads faster than some good gossip?
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