Celebrity news desks have formally reclassified the words "asking for privacy" as a content vertical. The change took effect Monday, hours after Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber released a two-sentence statement following the death of their son, Presley.
Sources close to the situation say the statement received the reverence a newsroom reserves for anything short. Editors read it once, noted the word "privacy", and assigned a twenty-six-slide photo gallery. Two outlets had a "life in photos" package live before the family reached the end of the second sentence.
Insiders describe a system so efficient it barely involves people anymore. The word "privacy" triggers an alert, the alert triggers a gallery, and the gallery triggers a headline about the family's dignity, which sits directly above the gallery. One staffer described the phrase "difficult and painful time" as, in industry terms, a strong hook.
"When a family asks for privacy, we hear them," said Dana Rook, spokesperson for the Association of Celebrity Content Producers. "We hear them so clearly that we publish the request twenty-six times, once per slide, so nobody can say we missed it."
