by Thinus Ferreira
If you love American television and popular culture and especially real, comprehensive and authoritative entertainment journalism and reporting about it, there used to be a Bible and its name was Entertainment Weekly.
But the Entertainment Weekly magazine and EW website of now is a ghost of a ghost of the Entertainment Weekly that existed in the 1990s and early 2000s when it had the scoops, the most incisive behind-the-scenes set visit stories, breaking news and interviews, along with striking, must-buy magazine covers.
Just over a year after yet another Entertainment Weekly top editor got fired, The Wrap reports that EW staffers are chronically upset, with one staffer who fired off an email this month to the magazine's top management about what "a joke" Entertainment Weekly had become.
For a long time, it's not just been readers of the EW site, magazine and its tired, "old-news" email newsletter but Entertainment Weekly staffers themselves who have noticed the degrading quality of the content that EW is churning out compared to years before.
One staffer, signing the letter to top management as "the elephant in the room", wrote an internal email earlier this month, slamming the way in which the writing and coverage at Entertainment Weekly had "gone downhill" even further compared to what it had been in its heyday in previous decades, expressing unhappiness with Entertainment Weekly's declining standards and a lack of editorial leadership.
"Yes, page hits are important but people are eventually going to tune out if articles are poorly written," says the email that was sent to Mary Margaret as EW editor-in-chief and other staffers.
"The out of context clickbait titles, posting out of context quotes and film reviews that sound like paid-for PR pieces from studios completely make a joke of our magazine and entertainment journalism," the EW staffer wrote.
The owner of Entertainment Weekly, Dotdash Meredith declined to comment on the letter.
