Sept. 12 wasn't exactly a slow news day in business journalism.
Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. sacked its CEO;
Goldman, Sachs & Co. reported better-than-expected earnings; the Justice Department defended its corporate prosecution guidelines; a panel was created to review Sarbanes-Oxley. But if you turned to
The New York Times the following day to get the scoop on these developments, you would find only one, the Bristol-Myers story, on its business section's front page. In fact, the most prominent piece on the page that day was hardly a business story at all — instead, it was a rather tortured retelling of the by-then oft-told tale of Lonelygirl15, the star of a series of wildly popular teenage videos on
YouTube.com who turned out to be a fake, or at least a twentysomething actress. (To be fair, the Times that day did run a piece on
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s canning of Patricia Dunn on page A1.) So this is business?
Our suspicions that this was not exactly a bona fide, or at least typical, business story were initially raised by the article's main byline, which belongs to Virginia Heffernan, the paper's television critic. Heffernan also writes a blog for the New York Times Web site called Screens, which, as media gossip site Gawker.com quickly pointed out, has been obsessed with Lonelygirl15, or Bree, as she is also known. The blog has posted 15 dispatches on the alleged teen since July 28, when Heffernan proclaimed Bree worthy of her own TV show. That means that in her own weird way, Heffernan has helped to feed the Lonelygirl15 "obsession" that she wrote about in the paper last week, though her Bree-bloggings were never mentioned in the newspaper story.
Making things weirder, the Times story last week was the first time anything about Lonelygirl15 had appeared in print in the paper, despite Heffernan's avid blogging on the topic. Meanwhile, other news outlets were covering the phenomenon in actual stories and suggesting strongly that Bree was a fake. New York magazine, for one, declared Lonelygirl15 "probably a hoax" but "the birth of a new art form" back on Aug. 28 in a TV-page story that cited Heffernan's suggestion that Bree get her own television show as proof that the teen had become a phenomenon. BusinessWeek media critic Jon Fine, for his part, deemed Bree "not real" in his column a couple of weeks back but, he too, called Lonelygirl15 "a triumph of a new art form." Newspapers ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Los Angeles Times to London's Sunday Mail also weighed in on the story, though not on their business pages, in the days leading up to the Times piece. Though all thought Bree was a fake, nobody seemed to know who was behind her, or why she was created.
But the Times, as is often its wont, waited to weigh in until Bree's creators had been identified (they include a doctor-turned-filmmaker and a screenwriter) and, as its story's opening puts it, the saga "appears to be in its final act." The paper then informed us that the whole project "appears to be the early serialized version of what eventually will become a movie" and then attempts to wax poetic on what it all means.
"The discovery and the swift and subsequent revelation of other details surrounding the perpetrators of the videos and the fake fan site that accompanied it are bringing to an end one of the Internet's more elaborately constructed mysteries," the Times intones. "The fans' disbelief in Lonelygirl15 was not willingly suspended, but rather teased and toyed with. Whether they will embrace the project as a new narrative form, condemn it or simply walk away remains to be seen." (Again we ask: so this is business?)
What also remains to be seen is if the Times' contention that Lonelygirl15 will be a movie is correct. Soon after the paper's story appeared, the Associated Press ran an interview with the videos' creators. Its message: "They are not a front for a big Hollywood studio marketing some upcoming film." So much for this saga being in its final act.
The Times wasn't the only outlet last week to recycle a well-played phenomenon as its own. Hot on the heels of Malcom Gladwell's recent and controversial pension story, The New Yorker dipped its intellectual toe into economics once again. This time around, the magazine explores the field of neuroeconomics, which tries to explain what goes on in our brains when we make economic decisions. It's a fun piece to read, especially since its author, John Cassidy, allows himself to be strapped to an MRI machine for a couple of hours while he considers a series of scenarios designed to see how he reacts to different investment options. (Alas, his test is inconclusive because he becomes more fixated on getting out of the MRI contraption than on making sound decisions.) But generally, the piece explains, neuroeconomics holds that people often choose instant gratification over long-term gain (no kidding!) and therefore can be used to support "asymmetric paternalism," a jargony political philosophy which argues that people should automatically be enrolled in forced-savings programs like 401(k) plans unless they opt out.
Cassidy's piece has already been dubbed " a classic" by the Neuromarketing blog, whose tagline is "Where Brain Science and Marketing Meet." But it's certainly not the first article on the topic. The Economist, BusinessWeek and the Times have all previously weighed in on the topic. But only The New Yorker devotes 5,000 words to it, quantity being one qualification for classic. —Yvette Kantrow.
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