Beijing Olympics World's Biggest Ever Gathering Of Hack Reporters!
You don't have to tell us journalists sure do love a clusterfuck. But in case you thought the credentialed journalists of the world were actually doing stuff less masturbatory with their time than repurposing news items about Manhattan Media News 'N' Gossip, well…you can stop feeling guilty! Because inspired by Michael Calderone's Politico post about some Forbes post about how there will be 15,000 journalists descending upon each of this month's political conventions — hey, clusterfuck alert: Calderone used to date my roommate! — we've officially culled a list of 14 Really Big Journalist Events. The Beijing Olympics is the biggest! (But: the Iraq War = DEAD LAST.) (No "heh"!) Click to see the beautiful graph and calculate how "connected" you are. Oh yes, and also, read my "analysis" of what events planners can learn from this.As you can see, the Beijing public relations strategy was brilliant: first, get the Olympics, then generate alarming rates of economic growth bulldozing and erecting structures and developing innumerable ambitious infrastructure projects in preparation for the thousands of journalists you are expecting for the Olympics, consuming such unprecedented amounts of energy in the process that oil prices rise more than tenfold between the year you land the bid and the year the Olympics actually happen, triggering fears of a recession in the overly developed countries whose living standards your artificially undervalued currency has been subsidizing, such that journalists feel obliged to attend the thing if only to write that last epic think piece on the Emerging Superpower before taking that buyout, while gas prices force the rest of the citizenry to sit at home and watch the Olympics. Hopefully over an ice-cold Coke Zero! But in lieu of that, cool cars seem to do the trick. A lot better if you locate them in a city that is not totally depressing.