The Ubiquitous Tabloid “Insider” — Revealed!

Keller admires his handiwork

Frank Keller never imagined that a little graduate school journalism project at Indiana’s Ball State University would lead to a glamorous job fabricating quotes for tabloids — but that is exactly what happened.

Popular celebrity magazines such as Star and Us Weekly depend on “insider” quotes to make the celebrity scandal du jour sound even more juicy.  Keller, as it turns out, is behind most of the gossip juice, landing his gig after a professor recognized his flair for the melodramatic and completely fake observations.

“I turned in an article about a campus prostitution ring, but Professor Mackey figured out I made up pretty much everything in the story.  Especially when police busted the ring, only to find out it was a Pi Phi scrapbooking group,” recalled Keller.

“Mackey failed me, but he saw I had a real talent for fooling readers with well-crafted nonsense.  That’s when he introduced me to a friend at Page Six, who needed some good quotes from a ‘bar witness’ about Vince Vaughn getting sloppy drunk.  Before you know it, my career as an ‘insider’ really took off,” Keller said, his pride evident.

Keller quit graduate school soon thereafter to make up observations for a number of gossip rags, and was quickly promoted to more prestigious fabricated relationships, including “friend of Brad Pitt” and “Gossip Girl on-set snitch.”

Keller reflects:  “I know it sounds crazy, but I feel like I really am an old friend that Kim dumped when she married Kanye.  And, I gotta say, it still hurts.”