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Trending on Google today is the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow is listing her guest house on Airbnb for one night only for $0. Two guests will also enjoy a home dinner with her and her husband, and should be "ready to get gooped."
See the listing here. Goopy excerpt:
There is plenty of media coverage for this, which of course is the point for both goop (stylized in lowercase) and Airbnb (I wonder if any money exchanged hands, and if so, in which direction). The good ol' CBS, CNN, People, and Forbes cover it straight and read like a moderately paraphrased press release. Insider goes for the edgy angle and titles its coverage "Gwyneth Paltrow is once again being called 'out of touch' for listing her luxurious Montecito guest house on Airbnb to combat widespread 'loneliness'," with the sources of its headline coming from social media, the wonderful fountain of truth.
But I bring this up because none of these articles explain how on earth the guests will be chosen, if it's artificially listed for $0. Is it whoever has the fastest fingers to click book? Is it a completely random lottery? Or is it a managed selection whereby the goop founder's PR team identifies the most photogenic interracial gay couple?
CBS, CNN, People, and Forbes don't mention this at all. Insider at least points out the ambiguity of this, except it does so primarily in the context of social media randoms guessing that the $0 is a placeholder and that its actual price will be out of their price range, which is apparently a sin. Washington Post has a tantalizing headline "Gwyneth Paltrow’s guesthouse is going on Airbnb. We have questions.", more precisely 10 of them, which I read in full, and none of them address this obvious question. Instead, we get edifying gems like, "Will Gwyneth offer you pajamas as cozy as her court wardrobe?", "Will there be candles?", and "Have we been mispronouncing chaise longue this whole time?"
It's not exactly a thesis on par with LK-99 for me to point out that the way these articles all manage to omit, imo, the most important detail suggests that the journalists are idiots and/or they believe their readers are idiots. Or they're just lazy and lack the instinct to think through the contradiction of having a limited, valuable (even if you don't value it, plenty obviously do) product marketed for $0 would work.
/vent
Obviously this is a publicity stunt by a genuinely weird person being covered because she’s a hot woman doing weird shit, and the media and a certain kind of the public eat that up. It seems to me that the Airbnb guest has already been chosen and wouldn’t surprise me at all if Airbnb had paid her for an endorsement deal.
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I don't think this really applies to 'journalism' as a whole because the people on the hippie celebrity remedies beat are probably not the finest - or most industrious - the profession has to offer. Or even more likely, these articles had a total five minutes of man-labour put into them, so all the writers had time to do was copy/paste bits from the press release before they have to move on and push out the next article onto the website. How many people actually care about it enough for it to be worth having a journalist spend more than the bare minimum effort on such an article?
Incidentally, that who-pays-who think has always occurred to me too; there's an amusing John Finnemore sketch about that but about one of those fast food/media tie-in things you often see.
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This reads like a euphemism to me. Isn't that the obvious question? Who names their company and product after a euphemism?
According to wikipedia, they've leaned into this kind of thing:
I don't think this is a good sign though:
Desperate marketing stunt to stave off disaster?
I thought the same re “ready to get gooped.” If it was a rando, you would think “these people are swingers.”
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GOOP x AIRBNB collab. PR activities, more at 7!
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I'm finding that more and more often since I first noticed it with Carolyn Strom. TL;DR: A bunch of news stories came out about a nurse charged with professional misconduct after she posted critical comments to her personal Facebook page. While that timeline is factually accurate, the media neglected to mention that the charges were primarily based on her subsequent actions, which were to put the Minister of Health on blast on Twitter.
More recently, the radio was covering emojis as signatures, but (unlike the article I linked) didn't mention that it was sent in response to the contract they had been discussing. They headed off on a weird tangent of which emoji would be the best for signing a mortgage, how it breaks down by age, etc. They never even alluded that texting "Yes, I agree" is a textbook example of a "signature" for that purpose, and instead warned people about being tricked into legally-binding contracts through malicious misinterpretation.
Entry-level journalists for a news site have to write 6 to 8 stories every day. There just isn’t time for research. You wait for something to bob up, read the cliffs notes, add your own colour or think of a way it could affect something people care about and then you send it off.
It’s a lot like commenting on the motte haha.
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Today you learn what a submarine is.
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At a guess, nobody cares about the actual night on offer. There are millions of ‘fans’, even if you’re obsessive enough to sign up it won’t be you. What attracts people is the fantasy of a night being entertained by a Hollywood star. That’s a product that millions can enjoy simultaneously and that millions want to read about. Auction mechanics, sadly, aren’t.
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