The Associated Press has a celebrity news division, writes long fluffy trend stories and offers opinionated (and controversial) political analysis. So while we haven't really been keeping up with what's going on at Reuters, we probably shouldn't be shocked that the newswire, once focused on financial information, just issued a long feature story asserting that 1> Tinsley Mortimer exists, and 2> that she heralds a new era in which New York socialites like herself pretend to have day jobs. Staying focused on business news seems to have paid off for the tyrannical regime that runs Bloomberg, and there seems to be plenty of high-impact finance stories to chase at the moment, but the temptation to swerve lanes on the information highway — newspapers making video, TV shows soliciting user-generated content, media gossip websites covering the Republican National Convention — is strong. Especially when you can always argue a connection to your core competency — in this case, that rich girls who don't need to ever work now feel the need to start their own businesses:

"These girls who want to be called handbag designers, they're basically expressing their sense that they're not taken seriously because they're called socialites," said... David Patrick Columbia, the editor of the New York Social Diary website... "And, you know, they're not."

For Devorah Rose, editor-in-chief of Social Life magazine, being known as a socialite is a mixed blessing.

"Anyone who's not a celebrity, who's being photographed going out, becomes a socialite," Rose told Reuters. "Because it's not exclusive anymore, nobody wants to be a socialite."

Sorry, Reuters: Writing about how socialites have these basically fake businesses is not business news.

But you can maybe pass it off as that. If you don't mind feeling like one of those society gossips who puts on Wall Street airs (just read a good article about those gals).

[Reuters]