Frankie Flack: Pack journalism invades business journalism

So last month, I was taking a short mental health break (flacking, believe it or not, can be draining at times), and I ran across a weird little story at Gizmodo about a company that will take your ultrasound and, using 3-D printing, create a life-size replica of your fetus. The story wasn’t, strictly speaking, “news” (CNet wrote on a related effort 18 months ago). And it wasn’t, strictly speaking, “important.”

Readable? Yes. Strange. Yes? Critical information that would allow me to better understand the world? No.

My beef isn’t that some digital journalist, somewhere, saw the 3-D fetus story decided it was worth a writeup. Hell, Gizmodo got my eyeballs. My beef is how widespread this stupid little story was. The Gizmodo story I read gave credit to Fast Company’s Co.Design for the story. Co.Design noted that it saw the news first on some site called WebProNews, which also covered the story. WebProNews got the start on the fetus piece from a post on PopSugar. Business Insider also wrote the story, also crediting PopSugar.

To recap: some of the nations largest and quickest-growing business and technology sites all wrote essentially the same, carbon-copy story based on one ur-post from a fashion-and-celebrity blog. A large number of real journalists, getting paid real money, took time out of their day to make sure that this particular meaningless story made it on their site.

Now, pack journalism has always been a problem. During the 1996 Olympics, I took a drive through the neighborhood where falsely suspected bomber Richard Jewell lived, and it was a circus: a hundred cameras, a thousand people, just waiting to report the same marginal set of facts. And that’s a moment that is re-played, with a different cast and a different location, with great frequency. But the Internet has compounded the problem: in the pursuit of the viral, you now have more people chasing less important things.

This isn’t just sour grapes. Once, in the past year, I had a client that was able to capture the zeitgeist. Reporters were crawling out of the woodwork to talk to us. As a flack, I should have been in my glory. Except that all but maybe a half-dozen of the stories followed the same cookie-cutter script. Sure, the bolus of coverage was great, but if I could have siphoned some of that off, given it to some deserving but under-covered story, I would have

That’s my real complaint: no matter how quickly a writer can bang out a re-write of the story of the day, there is still an opportunity cost. Those are minutes not writing about something else that might be equally cool. Minutes not spent finding that exclusive. The reality is that I — and pretty much all flacks — have at least one interesting, stupid-simple story that hasn’t been told yet. We’ve love to share it with you.

So before you go and write the eight-hundredth piece about 3-D printing or the new iPhone or the Bud Light Super Bowl commercial, ring up your favorite flack and give him 60 seconds. We’ll all be better off for it.