Entertainment journalism in Australia is getting easier by the minute. With international celebrity gossip websites like TMZ and Bang Showbiz, journalists no longer need to tackle the paparazzi scrum for snippets of Hollywood news.

This is clearly the case with The West Australian’s gossip page in the Today lift-out of the newspaper.

When the ACIJ conducted a week’s investigation into the relationship between PR and journalism, it found that out of 61 arts and entertainment articles in the West Australian, over a third of those were purely gossip excerpts straight from celebrity gossip websites.

Between September 7-11 , 2009, the study found that unattributed snippets of gossip news and celebrity quotes in the daily newspaper lift-out, could be found word-for-word across internet sites through a simple Google search.

Today section editor, Lucy Gibson, confirmed that their gossip page relies heavily on celebrity gossip websites.

“Well we basically come in the morning and just go through all the main newspapers in the UK and the tabloids and whatever, and go through the wire service and we’ll pick out the stories we think our readers would be most interested in for that page,” Gibson said.

On September 9, The West printed a story about Harry Potter star Emma Watson on her first day at University without any source attribution.

The following quote from the newspaper was typed into Google: “I probably sound like a paranoid nut but I’m doing this because I want to be normal. I really want anonymity”.

The search returned approximately 669 search results, each with the exact quote on websites ranging from gossip sites like, Cool Web Gossip to other news sites such as Ninemsn.

The article on Cool Web Gossip was even dated June 24, 2009, before Watson started university, which suggests the quote in The West Australian was actually three months old at the time of printing.

There was no indication of the original source or of the journalist’s byline. This was similar for a gossip story about Madonna, which appeared in the newspaper on September 8.

Quotes in the gossip story titled “Peace brother” about Madonna’s reconciliation with her brother, returned over 2000 Google results though the article again, had no source attribution or byline.

When questioned about the ethical practice of simply re-printing information straight from other websites, Gibson was adamant that if information is copied with the exact wording from another website, the newspaper attributes the information with its source.

“Generally a lot of it is rewritten, so we’ll get the stories and we’ll put our own little spin on it, which is why we don’t do that. If we’re running a story and we’re running it word for word from a particular site, then that’s where we credit AAP or Reuters,” Gibson said.

However, out of the 26 gossip excerpts in The West Australian that week, only one had an original source attribution despite every story returning a high number of Google search results.

“Pregnant Nicole Richie in hospital” on September 9 in the Today section, sourced X17 which was the only gossip story during that week that attributed a gossip website.

Amanda Hoh is a journalism student at the University of Technology, Sydney.