In 2024, a clip of Stellan Skarsgård at the New York premiere for ‘Dune: Part Two’ gained traction online for his irritable response to journalist Amelia Dimoldenberg.
D: “What was your favourite day on set?”
S: “It’s such a TikTok question because you want a question that has one short answer, and I don’t-”
D: “Or you could just say no”
S: “No”
While Dimoldenberg received deserved praise for her quick-witted reply, Skarsgård’s response may be more relevant two years on than many of us initially critical of his grumpiness care to admit. In the past five years, we have seen the effects of the rapid acceleration of streaming platforms and second-screen viewing on the media we consume. Runtimes are notably shorter, TV and movies are being framed to accommodate inevitable chopping into vertical content, and the promotional trailer feels like a thing of the past. However, what is less spoken of is the effect social media has on our secondary engagement with TV and film and how entertainment journalism itself must and has already bent to the will of the masses and their decreasing attention spans.
Entertainment journalism, in all its star-studdedness, is arguably one of the most accessible and widely interacted with forms of journalism, and never more so with the rise of social media. While clip-farming tactics are not exclusive to entertainment journalism and have become a rising feature in the political press in recent years, it remains a relevant case study for examining the clip-farming phenomenon and what it tells us about our culture and the value we place on journalism in our everyday lives.
But what is clip-farming? Originally a feature of online video streaming, clip-farming is generally defined as the deliberate fabrication of content through exaggeration or outrage, intended to be clipped into short-form content and spread on social media. This can range from wholesome surprise reunions to more controversial methods, such as staging petty drama or making offensive statements, to gain traction online.
As you’ve fallen into the habitual daily doomscroll, you’ve no doubt come across snippets of celebrities playing impromptu games, rapid-fire trivia quizzes, or receiving gifts from the interviewer during a press junket. Notably, these spontaneous moments are often instigated by interviewers who are primarily influencers rather than traditional journalists. You’ll remember these clips and perhaps share them with friends, but you may find yourself struggling to recall which TV show or movie the featured actors were promoting in the first place.
The focus of these clips usually centres on humanising celebrities through light-hearted tidbits. One of the forerunners of this kind of clip-farming is Thomas Duke, whose childhood movie diary allows actors to comment and reflect on his dedication to film. Another example is Jack Ben Edwards, who is most famous for concluding his interviews with personalised book recommendations for his celebrity interviewees. The moments themselves are not necessarily intended to fuel the fire of a contemporary literacy crisis, but they still fall into the bracket of journalists adopting clip-farming tactics rather than longer-form traditional interviewing methods.
In far more recent times, we’ve even seen entertainment journalism simply cut out the middleman and allow Hollywood’s biggest and brightest to humiliate themselves in the name of promotion, such as the cast of Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ performing an awkward 60-second rap giving a breakneck summary of the film’s plot on the Jimmy Fallon Show.
How does this differ from the entertainment journalism of the recent past? In the era of MTV and Barbara Walters, the bread and butter of entertainment reporting was mercilessly scrutinising Hollywood A-listers for scoops on their personal lives or capitalising on controversy. The ethics behind this kind of coverage were notably nefarious, such as the hacking of Jude Law’s private messages to reveal an affair or the constant onslaught of commentary on women’s bodies, such as with Kate Winslet’s. This came as a product of the 90s/early 2000s shift towards gossip-driven media with the rise of 24-hour tabloid TV stations and glossy magazines. It was also a time when celebrities still retained their untouchable star status before social media made them feel oversaturated.
Now that the scope of entertainment journalism has narrowed, along with audience attention spans, media outlets have been grappling with how to engage public interest. The purpose of press junkets has always been for actors and studios to promote upcoming projects, so is it damnable that journalists have moved with the times in finding the most effective means of getting their content to the world at large? According to Forbes, 5.79 billion people use social media worldwide as of 2026, accounting for more than two-thirds of the global population. So, adapting promotion tactics to this enormous market may seem like a stroke of marketing genius. However, now that the means of producing content and garnering international recognition have been placed in the hands of anyone with a smartphone, will clip-farming survive our evolving relationship with celebrity culture?
In an interview with the Pepperdine Graphic, entertainment journalist Gabby Gonta argues that the purpose of her job is “to bridge the gap between the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood and the average person”. While this may have been true five or ten years ago, it’s difficult to fathom this statement holding up in a world where we carry the inner lives of Hollywood A-listers in our back pockets. Celebrity culture has never been more prominent and yet so desensitised within popular culture. It seems that the clip-farming phenomenon feels less like a strategic move by publicists or a savvy shift with the times, and more like grappling with the dark side of our changing wants and expectations in the media we consume.
At a time when talk of a mass social-media-induced literacy crisis has plagued our feeds, is this new reality a disservice to the entertainment industry and journalism as a whole? It also raises the question of whether TV and movie coverage was ever intended to be intellectually charged or to serve as another medium for light-hearted escapism. Even having to ask whether the topic is “that deep” is indicative enough to show that there is a problem with audiences gauging what constitutes depth and what is passive entertainment. However, it is a problem far bigger than the quality of modern journalism, which acts as a mirror to the bigger dilemma at hand.
Longer and more substantial content has no place in the world of fast likes and 2X speed. Perhaps it may gain a second life when the thrill of finally realising that our favourite celebrities are human just like us subsides. This begs the question: are we really satisfied by watching Cillian Murphy hand Florence Pugh a bouquet to resolve an in-film dilemma? Is Brendan Fraser’s wholesome interaction with an interviewer professing their love for his career enough to quantify a successful interview? If journalism, in all its forms, is now centred on the demands of short-form content, can journalism still be thought of as investigative, or rather as another platform for performatism?
Olivia Dunne – Contributor