Associated Press ignored Paris Hilton for a whole week
This is pretty awesome. Apparently the AP decided they were going to have an experiment: Go an entire week without reporting on Paris Hilton, and see what happens. The end result was a ton of positive feedback from other members of the media: AP: We ignored Paris Hilton:
So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license.
Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at The Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that.
It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.
It was only meant to be a weeklong ban — not the boldest of journalistic initiatives, and one, we realized, that might seem hypocritical once it ended. And it wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on — the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality TV star most famous for a grainy sex video.
Of course I can appreciate the irony that Paris Hilton is such a closely-watched figure in the media, that a major organization ignoring her becomes news. So she gets free press no matter what.
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The only erronious journalism is the supposed “positive feedback”…In journalism school they teach you to make up what you can’t back up…Hey you guys don’t really need to go to school at all, why bother? Making stuff up saves money and effort and is a lot more fun..
Well, as a newspaper journalist myself, I don’t know where you got the idea that they teach journalists to make stuff up.
You mean you didn’t take Makeupology 101 in journalism school?