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Her
glare burned through the sleepless fog that blanketed my head. "How did
we miss this?" my former managing editor asked, waving a newspaper at
me.
My mind raced, still exhausted from working the late shift the previous day. Did something big happen just after the midnight deadline? I had checked out the competing papers that morning for any missed scoops, as was my habit in my early years of reporting. There were none. Whatever she was mad about was literally news to me.
"Why isn't there a story about Jason Priestley's car accident on the
front page?" she asked. "Or at least a teaser!"
As my coffee went to work, I vaguely remembered a spot on CNN about the former Beverly Hills 90210 actor crashing his car into a wall at the Kentucky Speedway. That was why she was angry with me?
"Because it's not news," I replied, earning myself an even worse death glare.
I'm reminded of this exchange every few years, when a big celebrity news story breaks. One of the best examples was May 27, 2006, when the birth of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (the daughter of actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) preempted news about an earthquake that killed more than 5,000 people in Indonesia.
In one case, a child entered the world in the African country of Namibia. In the other, a 6.2-magnitude quake killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more, damaged more than a hundred thousand homes and left at least a million people homeless. Which story affected more lives? Which one do you think was more widely discussed?
If Internet statistics are any indication, Shiloh won, hands down. Celebrities once again peppered Yahoo's annual list of the top overall Web searches for 2007. Pop star Britney Spears was the most searched for "item" on the Internet, with socialite Paris Hilton taking third place, singer Beyoncé in fifth and actress Lindsay Lohan finishing sixth (techcrunch.com/2007/12/03/yahoo-top-searches-2007-please-people-stop-typing-britney-spears-into-search-boxes/).
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