This week Hollywood star Gwyneth Paltrow has gone viral sharing a peek inside her fridge.
While it sounds a very social media-inspired idea, Penguin PR director Sarah Newton reveals how it’s not new at all – in fact asking famous people the contents of their fridge was her job when she was a junior reporter.
Here Sarah explains why:
I’ve always known that Gwyneth Paltrow and I had something in common. Aside from the similarities in looks (insert any kind of laughing emoji you like here) and a love of Coldplay – although to be fair I’m still waiting for Chris Martin to write me a love song – there’s another link between us.
For this week Gywnnie gave her fans an online and fairly extensive video tour of her enormous stainless steel fridge. Unsurprisingly, unlike my own appliance, she didn’t appear to have a half-eaten tin of baked bins stuck on the top shelf and some milk that you’d definitely need to sniff before pouring.
As you might expect there were eye masks and gua sha stone — for scraping better bone structure, of course — in between cans of the organic vegan Avaline wine that she got from celebrity mate Cameron Diaz. She also proudly claimed to have a ‘full spectrum of milk’ although this didn’t seem to include any that was questionably on the turn.
So, what exactly is the link between us? When I started as a trainee reporter on the Derby Telegraph – in the days when the paper sold in excess of 65,000 copies every day, across six different editions – it’s fair to say that my finely-crafted prose rarely troubled the news editor responsible for the ‘live pages’ those at the front of the paper.
I was more likely to be found writing about the opening of a new opticians on St Peter’s Street than I would a splash about a trophy winning trans golfer with the headline ‘That’s no Birdie’. (Yes, that actually happened.)
One of my least favourite jobs – and probably the one I received most ridicule for from the ‘proper reporters’ – was a weekly look inside a local celebrity’s… you guessed it, fridge!
Sadly, Gwyneth probably lived slightly out of our catchment back in 1995, but if she’d been seen driving anywhere near the A52 I’d have been sent out to discover just what she and fiancée Brad Pitt kept in their chilliest kitchen appliance (hopefully not a head – Se7en spoiler alert ).
Instead, the Derby Telegraph’s lucky readers had to make do with the inside story from the likes of local MP Edwina Currie (quite a lot of wine and some nail varnish, I seem to remember, and almost certainly no eggs). Anyone was fair game and the appliances of people such as the Mayor of Derby, Lady Scarsdale and anyone gracing the stage at Derby Playhouse, were all put under the spotlight.
In Your Fridge, for that was the title of the exciting column, ran for months (but for me it felt more like years – because, trust me, persuading people to let you look inside their fridge, and then make it sound interesting, is not as easy as it sounds).
Of course, this was just ‘filler’ – the light-hearted nonsense that filled out the bulk of the back-end of the news pages. The ‘real’ news would be the court cases, the murders, the car accidents and the sport.
But the irony is that today the media is able to track which stories their readers have the most appetite for, by website analysis and social media engagement, and it turns out In Your Fridge wasn’t as unpopular as you might think. In fact, all this data reveals that my refrigerator revelations were probably more popular than the news pages.
Today’s news stories are curated with engagement in mind and we can see this every time we look at news online – stories about the cost of cat food or extremes of the weather attract far more engagement than hard news.
The way the media reports, produces and distributes the news has changed dramatically in the last decade and of course the pandemic served as a reminder that a reliable news source should never be underestimated.
But local media is slowly starting to realise that fluff – rather than hard news – is important to readers. They want to know when the new Aldi is going to open, what attractions will be on offer at this year’s county show and potentially what everyone else keeps in their fridge.
Gwyneth’s video has been viewed almost half a million times – a figure that many media firms can only dream of.
And it proves I was way ahead of my time. So next time you’re stocking up your fridge after a big shop maybe give it a wipe round too – you never know who might come calling.
