Google Search: "Sarah Palin" restaurant

March 3


We in the trade media can be pretty self-satisfied sometimes, because we don't cover the same stories everyone else covers. Tiger Woods gets decked by his wife for messing around? We don’t care.

A kid goes up in a runaway balloon but not really? We don’t care.

Kim Kardashian — well, I don’t even know enough about Kim Kardashian to finish this sentence.

So we sit in our offices on Park Avenue and wonder a bit smugly why those people — those consumer journalists — insist on all reporting on the same things, and on things that, quite frankly, are not germane to the interests of their audience.

Of course we know why — we might be smug but we’re not stupid. It builds their audiences. It’s what the public responds to.

We wondered if we could experiment with this. Was there some way we could connect Sarah Palin, say, with restaurants in a newsy way and report on it? Would that increase our readership?

I did a quick Google search for “ “Sarah Palin" restaurant” and was rewarded with the video I have embedded here for your amusement.

It’s not newsy. It's from the 2008 election campaign and was posted to YouTube.com on September 28 of that year. It's a visit by Mrs. Palin to Tony Luke’s, which from what I understand is generally the third place for food tourists in Philadelphia to visit for cheese steaks. The first two are, of course, Pat’s and Geno’s.

I think the Geno’s crowd is probably a better fit for the former vice-presidential candidate.

Anyway, this blog entry is just a test to see if writing about Sarah Palin will increase readership.

It’s not a perfect test, but what test is? Even the landmark study indicating that oatmeal lowered cholesterol was flawed.

Seriously so, in fact: Test subjects were either given oatmeal for breakfast or bacon and eggs. Did the study show that oatmeal lowered cholesterol or that not eating bacon and eggs every single day for breakfast lowered cholesterol?

See? Even though I’m acting like consumer media and writing blog entries to try to drive traffic, I’m still able to educate my readers.

Thanks for stopping by.