Up to one-third of celebrities write their own blogs

Li Bingbing typed all those emoticons herself.

Beijing’s Mirror surveyed around three dozen of Sina’s nearly 300 celebrity bloggers and found that two-thirds admitted that they were not the sole maintainers of their blogs.

The celebrity bloggers, many of whom are among Sina’s most popular blogs, fell into three categories: those who claim to write their blogs themselves, those who have little to do with their blogs at all, and those who collaborate on blog posts with an assistant.

In the first category are luminaries like Xu Jinglei and Li Bingbing. Both actresses claim responsibility for every blog post – Xu says that she has never considered hiring someone to blog for her, and Li says that she “writes every post, every word, and every bit of punctuation herself.”

Other celebrities treat their blogs as just another promotional outlet. Fan Bingbing’s manager revealed that almost all of her blog posts are produced by an uncle-nephew team, and whoever is responsbile for writing Li Xiang’s blog has been criticized for being completely out of touch with what Li is actually doing.

Somewhere in the middle are celebrities like Li Yapeng. Li, whose posts about his new daughter and his extended family have gained him quite an audience, writes out all of his posts long-hand, says his manager. Since he doesn’t have the time or inclination to become proficient at typing, he typically hands his drafts over to a typist who posts them on his blog.

The Mirror article sees fan anger at the practice of using hired-gun bloggers as just one more manifestation of a general perception that celebrities lack integrity. Since so many celebrity blogs are self-serving at best and vectors for spreading misinformation at worst, is there any difference between a post written by a celebrity and one written by a ghostwriter? Does it matter who was responsible for posting about Li Xiang’s happy marriage while she was in the process of getting a divorce?

Just typical behavior from the glitterati, right? Perhaps what’s most impressive is that two-thirds of celebrities have any direct involvement in their blogs at all.