Amanda Hess* has a good piece on the life and death (mostly the death) of a 13-year-old YouTube "star" whose untimely passing due to an undiagnosed health problem led to his earning more fame than ever. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here (Gawker, as ever, remains a particularly scummy enterprise) but the crux of the post is that the "traditional" (read: print/TV and blogs older than six months) media made this kid actually famous after he died:
But now, Caleb’s death is receiving the kind of breathless coverage generally reserved for an A-list celebrity or a victim of a particularly gruesome murder. And in lieu of truly shocking details (or broad international recognition of who Caleb even is), news outlets are inventing plot points to pad out their coverage. Once it had spun the 13-year-old into a megastar, Gawker hammered Caleb’s parents for failing to release specifics about his death. His mother’s initial announcement, which attributed Caleb’s death to "natural causes," was "vague, to say the least," Biddle wrote. He slammed other outlets for their "credulity" in reporting the story, suggesting that the family’s statement couldn’t be trusted. Even after local cops announced that "nothing appeared to be criminal, nothing was suspicious and there was no foul play" in Caleb’s death, the theorizing persisted. When Caleb’s parents volunteered more information, People magazine spun that as another suspicious twist: "Caleb’s mother, Katie, originally said that her son died of natural causes, but on Monday, his parents revealed that he likely suffered from an undetected medical condition, though they did not elaborate on what that might be." (An undetected medical condition is a natural cause.) And when the Bratayleys aired even more information, telling Good Morning America about its family history with a heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the International Business Timesreported on the disclosure in the most salacious way possible, calling the condition Caleb’s "Possible Autopsy Result." The "possible autopsy result" of a child YouTube vlogger the publication had never deigned to cover before: That’s a headline.
Why did this happen? Clickbaiters gotta bait, in part, and nothing drives clicks like mysterious deaths. But isn't another part of the problem here that no one in the legacy media really understands what constitutes "fame" on YouTube? Remember when the president sat down with all those YouTube people for an interview and we all had a good laugh because one of them does her videos in bathtubs filled with Froot Loops or whatever?** That person has almost four million subscribers on YouTube and none of us had ever heard of her. I can't help but feel that the "Wow, look at this young person who is totally famous and mysteriously died!" reaction is, at least in part, a desire not to get caught unawares again.
*Hess has been killing it on the "culture of the Internet" beat, btw. Her piece on Twitter parody accounts was both fascinating and kind of disheartening, insomuch as it was a handy reminder that nothing online is real and people are earning millions in the ether for producing nothing of value.
**No, seriously, remember that? WTF.