Entertainment Journalism: Making it your Career

Ben Falk

Mar 2018 · Routledge

About this ebook

Entertainment Journalism is a practical guide to one of the most highly visible areas of media practice. Drawing on 20 years’ experience as an entertainment journalist, Ben Falk gives a comprehensive overview of journalistic reporting on the arts industries, with particular focus on film, music, TV and celebrity gossip. This is coupled with an extensive range of tips and tools to help students and young professionals hone the key skills required for a career in entertainment journalism. Interviews with industry professionals appear throughout, from current editors of the biggest entertainment brands, Hollywood bureau chiefs and critics to consumer publicists, multimedia content producers, live radio correspondents, video makers, TV presenters and social media specialists.

Topics include:

• breaking a story
• interviewing techniques
• working at press junkets and red carpet events
• working with PRs
• selling as a freelance
• using social media for reporting and networking
• breaking into the industry.

With up-to-the-minute expert advice, accessibly written guidance on writing and reporting and invaluable perspectives from those within the entertainment world, this is an instructive and insightful book for any aspiring showbiz journalist.

About the author

Ben Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Journalism at Coventry University, UK, and a freelance entertainment journalist. The author of celebrity biographies Robert Downey Jr: The Fall and Rise of the Comeback Kid and The Wonder of Brian Cox, he has written about showbiz for 20 years, contributing to dozens of magazines, newspapers and websites, including Yahoo Movies, BAFTA, Look, and BBC Films Online. He was Hollywood bureau chief for the Press Association and has worked as an entertainment television producer for ITV, Channel 4 and Sky.