Starsuckers: in cinemas 30 October 2009

Starsuckers Guide to Making Money Selling Stories.

For decades the tabloid press have made a fortune inventing tales of celebrity gossip. Now it’s your turn.

Background:

The society of professional journalists has a few things to say on the subject of journalistic ethics:

• The duty of the journalist is to … seek truth and provide a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.
• Conscientious journalists strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility.

Journalists should:

1. Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.
2. Identify sources whenever feasible. The public is entitled to as much information as possible on sources' reliability.
3. Always question sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Clarify conditions attached to any promise made in exchange for information. Keep promises.

Sadly these ethics seem as archaic as a guide to sending a telegram. The rampant commercialisation of the newspaper industry has meant that Tabloid Newspapers will pretty much print anything as long as it sells papers and gets clicks on their website. And as celebrity stories make the most money, these are the ones that are most likely to be drivel.

How Tabloids Print Lies.

1. Dodgy leads. All tabloid newspapers pay money to sources once the stories get published. In the world of celebrity gossip this is guaranteed to encourage people to cook up stories to make a few quid. If you saw the drummer from McFly getting out of a cab and walking into a restaurant, and called The Sun newsdesk this is hardly going to hit the front page. If, on the other hand, you told them that he was wearing a pink Tutu and singing “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain”, they would pay for you to dine at the Ritz.
2. Bad checks. Journalists know (or should know) that paid sources are prone to gild the lilly with their stories to push up the price. The celebrity world is riddled with flakes, bullshitters, alcoholics, layabouts, coke heads, speed freaks, acid baskets and - worst of all - PR’s. The basic fee for a celebrity tip in a nightclub is £50, which is co-incidentally the going rate for a gram of cocaine. Celebrity journalists know this more than anyone, so they are supposed to check the veracity of their sources before they print anything. So if you had tried to flog a paper your McFly story, it would be extremely simple for the newspaper to check it out by calling up McFly’s people: “Hello, this is The Sun newsdesk. We’re looking at a story about your client skipping out of a black cab in a pink tutu singing show tunes… what? He’s in Paris? Oh, right, sorry to disturb.” Simple. But in reality this often doesn’t happen as the journalists are too overworked to perform this basic check, or they couldn’t care less.
3. Exaggeration. The journalist has the story, but there’s another celebrity tutu story running that day. So the journalist adds their own spice and the headline becomes “Drummer from McFly gets out of taxi naked singing Nazi showtunes”.
4. Churnalism. A phrase coined by Nick Davis (author of Flat Earth News) that neatly sums up how most modern journalism now works. Once our McFly story goes onto the wesbite of that particular Tabloid, it is instantly read online by journalists working for all the other tabloids, broadsheets, newswires, gossip magazines, blogs and BBC news. All of which are massively under resourced and over worked and are working to insane deadlines, so they all immediately grab the story, add their own little bit of spice, and run it as though they broke the story themselves. The result is that the lie gets mutated and amplified all over the world in minutes.

How to sell a fake story

Ingenuity and improvisation are the keys to succeeding at this and we would very much appreciate any feedback from both successful and unsuccessful attempts, so we can update these tips. But the very basic rules are

1. Be funny. Humour is a far more valued commodity to a tabloid journalist than the truth, so the more they laugh the less they check.
2. Don’t be nasty. The more unpleasant the story, the more likely the celeb is to get angry and reach for their lawyer. This is not about libelling celebrities, but about showing how celebrity journalists will print anything. If it’s funny and silly no one is going to bother suing, and the newspaper is more likely to run it.
3. Have a name. This is very important to the journalists as a way of standing up a story (Clint Eastwood would have had real problems here) so make up a fake name. Silly names are also good – please let us know which ones you get away with (Neve O’Loony was our best fake source yet, just so you know the standard you have to aim for)
4. Have a phone number. This is extremely important to tabloid hacks, as no-one ever lied who had an operational telephone. Buy a pay as you go sim card for a fiver – you will easily cover the cost with your first story.

Follow these 4 rules and you should have your fake stories running round the world in no time. Additional tips:

Start with a kernel of truth. Do a small amount of research about which celebrity you are intending to make something up about. We found that certain paparazzi websites are updated almost real-time, (mrpaparazzi.com is great for this) so you can get a good handle on which celebrities have been where the night before. The tabloids own gossip pages are also useful for inspiration, and if it’s based on a happening that’s been printed in their own pages then – by some wonderful circular logic – they will naturally believe it to be true. If you create your own story based on real celebrity comings and goings, it is much more likely to stand up. Remember the tabloid journalists you are trying to convince are just sitting in another office looking at the same internet sites to back your story up.

Most tabloid celebrity stories are about celebs either doing or saying things. So you can go for a simple “Sarah Harding was drunk coming out of club” or “Lilly Allen said that her new album is great” but these aren’t going to get much traction as these banal titbits fly around all the time. To get something prominent you need to give it an unusual twist. So once you’ve found out that two well known celebs were in a west end club, you need to invent your own details. Maybe they had a tug of war? Maybe someone dazzled there fellow diners with a display of knee slapping, which was only topped by a page 3 model showing off her skill at playing the spoons?

Also avoid anything too fantastical – “Peaches Geldof was seen levitating over the Thames” is unlikely to be picked up by even the most gullible tabloid hack with the possible exception of the Sunday Sport. Then again we have seen some pretty insane stories appearing in recent years, so it’s worth trying something physically impossible every now and then to see if you can get away with it.

Who are you? How did you come across this story? Tabloid journalists prefer eyewitness sources, but they will also accept “my mate told me that” sources as well. Quite often people call up who happened to see something or randomly overhead a quote. Maybe you were on your sisters birthday in Café de Paris when David Walliams farted “God Save the Queen”. Maybe you’re a cab driver and you overheard Jamie Winstone saying he used to be a member of the boyscouts and still goes on camping trips in his shorts and his woggle. Make it potentially believable but keep the details vague, so they don’t have much to pull you up on.

Timing is key. Tabloids have a print cut off between 4-6 pm, so it’s good to wait until the afternoon to call in. This is because they will be sitting there with empty pages to fill and under intense pressure to produce something hot. Also if you call in an hour before they go to press it gives them no time to check your story out.

Who to call? We would always call the same story around several papers, which increases your chances of getting it run.

The Mirror 0800 289 441. Desperate for tips, and probably the easiest paper to get nonsense stories printed. That’s what 10 years of having Piers Morgan at the helm will do to a newspaper. At one point they asked our researcher to come in and work for them. Though another time we called up to check what the payment would have been for a story, they said that they wouldn’t pay anything, so be careful.
The Daily Star 0208 612 7373. Also pays well for stories. We had several successes here. Also prone to add their own fantastic details which is always good for a laugh
The Sun – 020 7782 4100. Pretty gullible, but has peculiar print cut off at 10.30 am for showbiz stories. Also pays very well, £600 for a lead story in Bizarre.
The Express - 0207 098 2982. Chronically understaffed so lots of opportunity to feed them nonsense.

The Call. It’s worth rehearsing a few times with a friend and practise thinking on your feet. The best liars do so by first convincing themselves (think Tony Blair and Iraq), so try and imagine yourself actually in the club, bar, wherever and get as many details in your head as you can. When you call stay in character and try not to laugh. It’s no good if you start the call as a Geordie and end it as a Scot (though this did happen to us and they still ran the story). They are likely to ask you:
-How you got to see what you saw
-A few details about you
-How much the celebrity had had to drink
-What they were wearing
If they ask anything that you think might rumble you it’s best not to guess. Say you can’t remember, that you were drunk, or that you need to check with your mate and then call them back. Don’t worry too much about sounding unreliable… they print stories from unreliable sources every day of the year.

The money. It’s important to note that we did not take a penny from any of the stories we fed the tabloids, as it would have undermined the integrity of what we were doing with the documentary. You on the other hand have no such restraints, so our advice is to get as much money as you can. Prices range form £50 for a couple of lines at the bottom of the page, to £600 for a lead story in the Bizarre column in The Sun. They only pay out for a story when it’s printed, and make sure you get the price agreed in the phone call, and hold them to it (some papers are notorious for reneging on deals, so make sure it’s properly agreed)

If at first you don’t succeed… keep on trying! Sometimes our calls led nowhere, other times we had several stories running at once. It’s impossible to predict what journalist is going to fall for which story, so it’s best to play the numbers and do lots of stories to lots of papers over time. Have different characters and accents and keep on calling, and remember to let us know of your successes!