Popbitch

The Popbitch office was everything I popbitch have hoped for and more: a poky room, cluttered with odd collectibles and mundane office supplies, popbitch, on the ground floor of a creaky Soho townhouse that had been converted into a shared office space. On one shelf, a pack of Chairman Mao playing cards popbitch propped up by a box of ink cartridges. On another, a Russian doll depicting Dmitry Medvedev was nestled between a bag of Fairtrade coffee and potensic stapler, popbitch. A third was occupied by a mysterious silver suitcase and a white Bosch kettle, half filled.

For those in the know, Thursday afternoon, between the hours of four and five, is the bitching hour. Well, sort of. Camilla Wright, who founded Popbitch in January , is still at the helm. Since moving to Hong Kong last year, though, editorship has been passed to Chris Lochery, who began his career as an intern there eight years ago. Twenty years ago newspapers, then making their first tentative forays onto the web, were still the gatekeepers of our worldly information, and their denizens were numerous. It was unifying to so many people. Some, like Julie Burchill and Toby Young, sought to intellectualise it, without really succeeding in wiping the sneers off their faces.

Popbitch

Popbitch is a weekly UK -based celebrity and pop music newsletter and associated dating website from the early s. Much of the material for the newsletter comes from the Popbitch message boards, frequented by music industry insiders, gossips and the casually interested. The board has at various times been credited for celebrity rumours both false and true appearing in the press, and the coining of many expressions that have gone on to enjoy wider usage. The website was the first of many satirical and irreverent UK gossip sites that skirted the limits of defamation law. The uncompromising ethos of cruel humour gave it a feel somewhat similar to usenet gossip newsgroups. Popbitch was founded, is owned and run by Neil Stevenson and Camilla Wright , both journalists. Wright is employed full-time to run Popbitch. Stevenson is still a director, but his active participation in the project has diminished. Stevenson was employed by the British publishing house EMAP on various entertainment titles, including the celebrity magazine Heat and as editor of The Face. The newsletter is aimed principally at a British audience and is published weekly, usually on a Thursday. It usually contains celebrity-based stories relating to music, film, television and sport, with quirky stories from other fields. By , Popbitch had moved from a niche-market publication to mainstream cultural knowledge, thanks in part to its role in assisting British tabloid newspapers with their entertainment coverage. It played some part in popularising terms such as Croydon or council facelift , "gak" meaning cocaine , and "pramface" a term of abuse contracted from "a face more suited to pushing a pram around a council estate ". It gained a reputation as being first with a number of celebrity-based stories. One poster reported David Beckham 's move from Manchester United to Real Madrid at least four months before sports pages picked up on the story — then stood by the story in the face of repeated denials.

WNIP Archive. Career high? The website was one of the first websites to detail accusations of necrophilia and child sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile popbitch his lifetime, popbitch.

The case study today is a successful plain text newsletter that shuns pictures, graphics and emojis. Yet this year-old weekly has , free subscribers, and advertisers queueing up for the high-performing text slots. Text is either plain or bold, there are no pictures, emojis , and page architecture is created from dashes, chevrons, and black rules. Headlines are tight, short, centred and inside double chevrons. Some stories are as brief as one or two sentences. The longest is words in 4 paragraphs. Overall, this gives the content a sense of urgency , making it look like the words have been bashed out on a typewriter and pasted in just in time for the deadline.

One far-off day at the turn of the 21st century, just as the mythical Millennium Bug was pointedly failing to wreak havoc on the internet, Camilla Wright — a twentysomething, Oxford-educated freelance journalist with a history of NGO work in Eastern Europe — pinged an email newsletter to 15 of her friends. Wright and her then-boyfriend Neil Stevenson, an editor at a fledgling entertainment magazine named Heat, were disappointed by the dearth of irreverent celebrity news since the golden days of Smash Hits, the cheeky weekly that bestrode their beloved s pop scene. So they injected their mailout with wry commentary and off-the-wall music news, such as charts of the tunes most requested at funerals number one was Celine Dion. Their first gossip stories included names already fading from popular consciousness: Meg Mathews, Macy Gray, Puff Daddy — now P Diddy — and an anecdote from Eric Clapton's champagne-free New Year's Eve party, at which he and fellow former-alcoholic celebrities saw in the millennium sober. Wright and Stevenson christened their creation, which has just turned 10, "Popbitch". Popbitch may not have created Noughties celebrity culture — that charge can probably be laid at the doors of others, such as Endemol, Heat itself or Simon Fuller — but, like a Today programme for tittle-tattle, it set the tone for the discourse. The entertainment press was still dominated by publicist-controlled, copy-approved features. We wanted to be Smash Hits for adults: a slightly odd, personal look at popular culture

Popbitch

For the past 17 years, Popbitch has made its business spilling the secrets of the rich and famous. Now with a subscriber base in the hundreds of thousands, the weekly newsletter prides itself on dishing the very best dirt each and every Thursday. Longtime readers will have heard from Popbitch long before the mainstream media about major scandals from the News International phone hacking controversy in the UK to secrets behind several celebrity super-injunctions and, most recently, the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. So finding the best possible way of fulfilling their email campaigns has always been essential.

Synonym for construct

A year-old minimalist newsletter with , subscribers: Popbitch case study. On one shelf, a pack of Chairman Mao playing cards was propped up by a box of ink cartridges. Supplemented by some events, reader contributions, subscriptions and Axate -generated micropayments on certain paywalled articles, Wright said the business had always made enough money. Stevenson was employed by the British publishing house EMAP on various entertainment titles, including the celebrity magazine Heat and as editor of The Face. Just because there are some people out there who are interested in buying it, there might be other people who are interesting to us. So probably about one in four or five come to anything. After reading 2, every other article is free for that week. Career high? Stevenson departed to edit style magazine The Face in Website articles, which tend to be investigative and go deeper into celebrity naughtiness , are 25p each, but the most you can spend in a week is 50p. Content from our partners. Twenty years ago newspapers, then making their first tentative forays onto the web, were still the gatekeepers of our worldly information, and their denizens were numerous.

Back in , British journalist Camilla Wright was fed up with the PR sugarcoating of celeb profiles.

They hated them. Of course, many are stuck in the doom loop of dependency on programmatic ads, requiring more and more eyeballs, leading to editorial judgments that negate true reader engagement, and newsletters with a teaser function to get a click. Like its neighbour, Private Eye , the early years of the newsletter were marked by cease and desists. Aimed at marketers and those involved in the advertising industry. In the newsletter being reviewed it seems to be the only paid advert other than house ads for subscriptions and a contra deal for a complementary newsletter. A year-old minimalist newsletter with , subscribers: Popbitch case study. The lightning-quick proliferation afforded by the platform surely makes a weekly newsletter redundant? Putting something together that people, in their hundreds of thousands, still bother to read every week. Hated the autoplay videos everywhere. On another, a Russian doll depicting Dmitry Medvedev was nestled between a bag of Fairtrade coffee and a stapler. The list appears to have been built through word of mouth and the sign-up page on the website. After greeting me at the front door with a firm handshake, Popbitch boss Camilla Wright — dressed half smart with a silky black shirt up top and bright green trainers below — showed me to a seat at the far end of a rectangular metal table that took up much of the room.