There is such a thing as healthy curiosity. And it’s only normal that we be curious about our role models, trying to find out as much as we can about them to learn to apply what makes them so great.

But there is something wrong about our role models being misbehaving celebrities and there is something even more wrong with our collective obsession with them, as demonstrated by the endless number of tabloid newspapers, magazines, websites and even blogs.

How much is too much? The New York Times published a very interesting article on the subject:

Turning Some Online Writers Less Opinionated

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD; Published: March 8, 200

The Internet has made it easy for a lot of young writers to make money by making enemies. Defamer, Dlisted.com and PerezHilton.com lambaste Hollywood; and Jossip and Gawker make fun of New York media.

Whenever it is time to leave those sites, though, the mocking writers often seem to have a change of heart as they try to change their jobs.

The editor and writers at Defamer, the Gawker Media site, have taken a similar turn. Last Monday, they moved over to work on the reopening of the Movieline Web site. (Defamer is being absorbed into Gawker.)

“Gawker had tried to turn us, this year, into something we weren’t,” said Seth Abramovitch, who was the editor of Defamer. “It wasn’t just snarky. It could get outright, I thought, kind of exploitative.”

But exploitation gets page views. In January 2008, Gawker sent an employee to videotape the body of the actor Heath Ledger being rolled out of the New York City apartment where he had died, and Defamer ran the video.

Commenters objected with messages like, “Take this one down, guys” and, “It’s just bloody wrong” — but the link to the video received more than 32,000 views, more than the posted obituary for Mr. Ledger did. Mr. Abramovitch says that item made him particularly uncomfortable.

Mr. Abramovitch said that Movieline, which will reopen in the spring, would have less “cutting and mean-spirited gossip” like that and more enthusiasm for movies.

Read the rest of this interesting article here.