The demise of E! News, which will air its final TV broadcast on Sept. 25, marks the latest nail in cable TV’s coffin.
But for a generation raised on the daily cable show’s addictive formula of breaking Hollywood headlines and marathon red carpet remotes, it signifies something much more: It’s the end of a golden age for celebrity news.
“Things are sadly just so different these days, because of how television has shifted,” notes Jason Kennedy, 43, one of E! News’ longest tenured anchors, having shared the desk with Giuliana Rancic from 2012 to 2019. “Not a lot of people come home and watch news anymore, especially on cable, because they can get it on social media.”
Like MTV News before it, which shuttered in 2023, E! News now stands as a crumbled monument to a monolithic media culture, felled by the rise of algorithms and smartphones.
Launched in 1991, its innovation was that it took showbiz as seriously as CNN took politics and crime. In doing so, E! News helped popularize the modern fixation on a side of Hollywood once meant for industry eyes only — everything from celebrity bad behavior to box-office grosses.
E! News (from left): weekend anchors/correspondents Jason Kennedy, Catt Sadler (2014).
Brandon Hickman/E! Network/Courtesy Everett Collection
“There was that time, like 2008 to 2012 — the Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears era, going to Kitson on Robertson,” Kennedy reminisces. “It’s almost like an untouchable time in entertainment news, and I was just lucky to be a part of it.”
Some of his most memorable stories involved celebrity deaths. “I think we did 48 hours of live coverage for Michael Jackson,” Kennedy recalls of the pop titan’s fatal propofol overdose in 2009, during which he worked for E! News as a correspondent. “I’ll never forget arriving at the scene at UCLA Medical Center after he died. Thousands of people showed up.”
Two years earlier, Anna Nicole Smith’s overdose death served as a baptism by fire into a new era of celebrity journalism, with E! News churning out a 24-hour cycle of coverage and gossip blogs, a then-relatively recent phenomenon, fanning the flames.
“My bosses called me and were like, ‘You got to get down to Florida,’” Kennedy recalls. The story dragged on for weeks, turning into a paternity battle over Smith’s daughter Dannielynn. In the end, he “was gone for a month” covering the Anna Nicole media circus.
Melanie Bromley joined E! News in 2012, where she served as chief news correspondent. She suspects her posh British accent helped land her the plum assignment of covering the impending birth of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s first child.
That, too, turned into a monthlong waiting game. “They put me up at the Dorchester, this gorgeous, five-star hotel in London,” Bromley, 50, recalls. “I’d spend all day coming up with news packages so we had something for the show every night — just to justify the cost of me staying there.”
Not much after she was at it again, covering the lavish nuptials of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, whose 2014 wedding rehearsal was staged at Versailles, while the actual ceremony was held at a 16th-century fort in Italy, where John Legend, Lana del Rey and Andrea Bocelli performed. “Just bonkers stories,” Bromley muses. “I can’t imagine anyone having that kind of budget to cover in the same way anymore.”
She reminisces wistfully of a bygone era of Hollywood nightlife — not just pre-pandemic, but pre-President Trump — when “there were celebrities everywhere, photographs of celebrities going out for dinner, parties and red carpets — there was just so much going on.”
E! News Daily, from left: Suzanne Sena, Greg Agnew, Steve Kmetko, Julie Asner, Gina St. John, David Adelson, Linda Grasso, 1991-1998
E Network/Courtesy Everett Collection
Those red carpets formed the spine of E! News coverage, starting with correspondent Joan Rivers’ outrageous taunts and then shifting to a far more reverent tone from 2006 to 2021, when Ryan Seacrest joined Rancic for live news desk and awards show coverage.
For Kennedy, who replaced Seacrest and who was typically stationed along those carpets, the nights “always felt like a NASCAR race. There would be weeks of preparation — but you can never really prepare, Afterwards, it’s this emotional experience of, ‘I can’t believe I actually did that.’”
“I often have women say to me, ‘Oh, gosh, I used to want to be an E! News correspondent. That was my dream,’” says Bromely.
“People still love celebrity news and entertainment, but now they get their fix from Instagram or TikTok,” she adds. “But in those days, people loved E! News. It was a window into this world that was glitz and glamor.”