On August 23, 1926, the New York Evening Graphic published a photo of Rudolph Valentino dead. In the Graphic’s photo, Valentino — the 31-year-old silent film moviestar — was in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel’s “Gold Room,” his body prone on an altar. Many other tabloids then sent photographers to the Campbell Funeral Home, looking to get photos of their own. Arriving at the Gold Room, the photographers found no body. Valentino wasn’t there.
Valentino had died that morning, and he was going to be sent to Campbell’s — the same famous New York status-symbol mortuary that would go on to organize the memorials of John Lennon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeffrey Epstein, Jackie Kennedy, and The Notorious B.I.G., among many others. But when the Graphic (nicknamed the PornoGraphic since its founding in 1924) published their breaking-news photo of Valentino, the actor’s body, yet cooling, was at the hospital. The image the Graphic published was what the tabloid’s editors called a “cosmograph,” an early photocollage technique which the Graphic often used.
Valentino’s sudden and unexpected death caused an extreme reaction from the public. Many fans reportedly committed suicide, with one British actress ingesting a fatal dose of poison. The day of Valentino’s funeral, an estimated 100,000 people took to the street. One newspaper headline of the time read: “VALENTINO RIOTS A VIOLENT ORGY,” with an accompanying photo showing a swarm of people outside Campbell’s Funeral Home. With his death, Hollywood sex symbol Valentino transcended his previous meaning and became a martyr for the people. Tabloids recognized that they could attract readers through increasingly absurd content about his death, and so the Graphic published photocollages of “Valentino in Heaven” — as reported to them through a hired psychic medium. After long battling the New York Post and the New York Daily Mail for ratings, the Graphic’s coverage of Valentino’s death earned them a major jump in readership, reaching 100,000 copies sold a day.
The Graphic effectively democratized the public’s access to their dead hero, using a spliced photo of Valentino in the Gold Room and images of the actor in Heaven. The martyr was accessible, for a very small price, only hours after his death. Valentino was perhaps the first celebrity whose death was used as an advertising tool. According to an article from the New York Public Library, the Graphic’s response began an “era of movie stars with rabid fan clubs and an active media breathlessly reporting every aspect of their lives.”
The result: tabloids established a partnership with death. They give false interiority into the life of the departed — simulating the experience of actual loss for readers — while profiting from captive readership. Rather than critiquing the way that media establishments use death, the readers themselves should reflect. What is it about the tabloid’s facsimile of death that is so attractive, and why do readers keep returning to it?
On August 31, 1997, Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris. She was fleeing half a dozen paparazzi on motorcycles, with her fiance and a drunk friend, who was driving. News outlets would later publish pictures of the crash, after all the bodies had been removed. The matte-black Mercedes-Benz is without windows or windshield, crumpled like a slinky with the engine visibly pushing into the front seats. According to Edward White, the author of Dianaworld: An Obsession, Diana was a “consumerist princess.” In his interview with Forbes magazine, White said that in the week between Diana’s death in Paris and her funeral in London, her mythology reached a level previously unseen. “It was extraordinary—she kind of transcended herself in that moment,” he said. “She enters this different space. She becomes like a cultural icon and a historical figure of real importance in that week.”
Tabloid editors had narrativized Princess Diana’s life perhaps more than any other living person, especially after tabloids gained popularity in England in the 1960s. Diana collapsed the distance between the image of an everyday person and that of royalty, flourishing within the princess archetype while remaining relatable. Reading a tabloid — or reading anything — the reader is negotiating a relationship of recognitions and disavowals. With which characters (real people) do they identify, or with which do they not? In this way, sensationalization in tabloids works in much the same way that travel narratives were used to Orientalize and justify colonial distinctions, just at a more hyperlocal level. Reading and seeing the other allows you to decide your relationship with them. In Princess Diana, readers found someone whom they could both love and hate. While attaining a class-level that is unimaginable to most, she symbolized an honest and emotional resistance to British traditionalism. With the death of the White’s “consumerist princess,” the readers of England’s tabloids felt like they lost someone they knew intimately. With her death, their semi-royal aspirations disintegrated. The reader who gazes at pictures of their favorite celebrity dead, reading a sensationalized article about their ending, feels as if they are confronting the mortality of someone they know, while in-practice avoiding real proximity to a loved one’s death.
The loss of a loved one often causes the living party to confront their own mortality. The celebrity death, sensationalized, allows the reader to pretend as if they are imagining their own death. But the deaths in tabloids (especially that of Diana) are not equatable to the deaths of most people. Diana has lived on after death, through her photographs that have been reproduced endlessly. According to White, the further away we get from August 31, 1997, the larger the archive on Princess Diana’s life grows. Swooning over her passing, the reader subconsciously imagines that their death is worthy of a similar response.
Despite Diana’s strange and personal relationship with the U.K. tabloids, her death caused temporary reflection among the media-consuming public. During Diana’s funeral, her brother Earl Spencer attacked the press, saying that Diana was “the most hunted person of the modern age.” They had extracted value from her in a parasocial way, chasing her and “hunting” until her death. A 1997 Gallup poll found that 43% of U.K. respondents considered the photographers to be “extremely” responsible for her death, with 64% of respondents considering tabloids themselves to be “extremely” or “very” responsible. For a brief time, the ratings of major British tabloids fell catastrophically.
But many critics of predatory tabloid tactics were the same individuals who had been happily consuming the content of Diana’s life for years. Death converted Diana into a martyr, both in the war against British royal traditionalism and in the war against debauchery. Her death caused the public to recognize their own complicity. Having colluded with the tabloid editors, readers themselves had caused Diana’s death. Recognizing their own aspirations in her, they realized they had killed themselves.
The phenomenon of death is both repulsive and attractive. Readers pretend to avert their eyes, but in-practice are entranced by the final goodbye that they cannot comprehend. Much of “regular” media — daily newspapers and bulletins — draw on death to gain readers, but tabloids have an almost caricaturized relationship with it. They are dependent on it, in the same way that certain readers are dependent on their coverage of death so that they can be constantly reminded they are living.
Although some tabloids — mostly notably the New York Post — are still finding relative success, a number of tabloids are suffering. The National Enquirer, the National Examiner, the Globe, OK! Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly have all seen steady and severe declines in terms of their readership and ratings; at the most extremes, the New York Sun folded in 2008 and the New York Daily News closed their offices in 2020. Part of this decline can be attributed to the success of groups like TMZ. But the democratization of online death has also added to this decline. In a 2015 Atlantic article, the founder of FindADeath.com Scott Michaels, says that most people are afraid of admitting their obsession with consuming content relating to death. “Everyone was buying their tabloids and tucking them into their Wall Street Journal,” the Atlantic reports him saying. Tabloids have always been looked down on by cultural critics. But for a long time, their exclusive access to sensationalized death continued to attract even the most sophisticated socialites. The internet has now given younger generations a more direct relationship and access to death. After relying on death for so long, tabloids are themselves dying.
The celebrity death, now so readily available online, is then subsumed by a brand of political death in tabloids. The shock factor gone, competition with the accessibility of gore on the internet has only further incentivized sensationalism, necessary for the tabloid’s survival. In 2025, the New York Post still has a “deaths” section — notably, similar but different to the “obituary” sections of many other news outlets. On October 30th, the Post’s headlines read “Son beats mother to death with hammer,” “Illegal immigrant allegedly kills county board member and wife,” and “Husband called wife as he was being crushed to death by concrete burial vault.” Celebrity deaths are still announced. But in their absence, the tabloid’s perverse fixation with death has created a mutual addiction, where readers and editors both need death. The headlines of the New York Post have, at a level, associated death with more tangible political fears, that draw on readers’ fears of change. Even as tabloids fizzle out, the reciprocal relationship they have developed — where tabloids gain readership by giving readers false interiority into the experience of dying — is replicated across genres and media outlets. Death is an effective image to use, in the hopes of attracting and retaining readers. Sometimes, seeing the death of a celebrity, I recognize other more real deaths. I imagine family members who have passed in front of me, then imagine the ones to come, and then imagine my own death. Coming back to the tabloid, I turn the page to see who is next.