In other words: The Huffington Post reports that Hollywood Life
(to render its name properly) reports that Us Weekly is making the
bold claim that Katy couldn't cater to Russell's sexual needs.
Or, now that you're reading it in my column, perhaps it should
be: Ad Age reports that HuffPo reports that Hollywood Life reports
that Us Weekly is making the bold claim that Katy couldn't cater to
Russell's sexual needs. And probably I should credit Twitter in
there somewhere.
It appears that HuffPo relied on Hollywood Life's account of Us
Weekly's report because Us Weekly doesn't put everything from its
print edition on its website. So a hard-working journalist at
Hollywood Life apparently rolled up his or her shirtsleeves and
actually paged through a copy of Us Weekly so as to quote from
it.
Such investigative reporting is clearly too much for The
Huffington Post Celebrity channel.
As it happens, I live near AOL/HuffPo headquarters in
Manhattan's East Village, so I can tell you that copies of Us
Weekly are actually available within the building. Many of
HuffPo's staff bloggers are housed at 770 Broadway, a stately
edifice that was once a Wanamaker's department store. It's mostly
office space now, though there is a depressing Kmart with an
entrance on the ground level. That Kmart is open seven days a week
from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Us Weekly is available at the
checkouts.
But maybe the HuffPo blogger behind this Katy-and-Russell post
was working very early or very late and was therefore unable to buy
a copy of Us Weekly at Kmart? Well, within a two-block radius of
HuffPo HQ, there are a couple of 24-hour newsstands that literally
never close (not even on Christmas or Arianna Huffington's
birthday). Both stock Us Weekly.
But wait. Walking a couple of blocks to buy a copy of Us Weekly
might qualify as old-school shoe-leather reporting, which was
clearly too much to ask of The Huffington Post in this case.
I've been thinking about web-tastic celebrity "journalism"
lately because, as my colleague Nat Ives wrote on Dec. 30, Ad Age
got "lots of attention for running an ad-world poll that crowned
Rihanna's campaign for Armani the sexiest ad of 2011." Except, as
Nat then pointed out, we never published such a thing and no such
poll was ever conducted. It was totally made up.
The "source" of the story about Ad Age 's nonexistent sexy-ad
poll was the Daily Mail, the second-biggest newspaper in Britain,
which got punk'd by an enterprising publicist. A ripple effect
ensued, with news outlets around the world quoting from the Daily
Mail's false report.
I traded email with Ad Age Editor Abbey Klaassen about
Rihannagate last week, and she was still amused and annoyed. As
Abbey explained, "The thing that killed me about "our' naming
Rihanna's ad the sexiest of the year was that none of these sites
that picked it up from the Daily Mail, which wrote its story based
on a made-up newswire story from a shady PR firm, bothered to look
for a link to the original Ad Age story. If they had, they wouldn't
have been able to find one. And then maybe someone somewhere would
have actually called us to ask about it. But instead they were just
content to cite third-party sources the whole way and, in the end,
it was absolutely, 100% bullshit. Do these people have no pride in
their work?"
This might be a good moment to mention that The Huffington Post
was among the sites that regurgitated its own version of the
bullshit story after reading it in the Daily Mail. HuffPo sprinkled
some magic link-bait fairy dust on its post by titling it "Sexiest
Ads Of 2011 List Includes Rihanna, Miranda Kerr, Models In Skivvies
(PHOTOS)." Tipped off to the hoax by Nat's post, HuffPo later
deleted its story -- but not before HuffPo readers took time out of
their fulfilling lives to post 239 comments, including
Sharkcellar's one-sentence review of HuffPo's slide show: "A hardly
spooge-worthy collection." (By the way, commenter Sharkcellar is a
designated "Superuser," which means, according to HuffPo, that he's
"earned the Level 2 Superuser Badge!" As of this writing he's
posted 2,975 comments across the site.)
On that note, I'm going to leave you with a headline I just
wrote: HUFFINGTON POST CAN'T CATER TO SHARKCELLAR'S SEXUAL NEEDS.
Feel free to tweet or otherwise share it. I'm pretty sure
it's true.
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist
for
Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter
href="http://j.mp/149Zog" title="Simon Dumenco on
Twitter">@simondumenco.
