#RoyalBaby: Breaking news. There’s no news

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL July 22, 2013

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The most innovative spin of all. When there’s no real news but media outlets have to keep reporting, what better to say than to report the report? (It’s been like this for weeks with ABC reportedly despatching a dedicated anchor to London to inform America about the royal who will not be its head of state.)

So, The Herald Sun’s rather ludicrously headlined “Kate Middleton’s royal baby is born …on Wikipedia”, which was, actually yesterday’s piece in The News and that from the day before elsewhere. Everyone’s carried it, how else to cover news that’s not breaking? So it’s had an airing in The Advertiser, Perth Now, The Daily Telegraph and on and on and on. Everyone stuck to the absurd headline, which described the infant as “Kate Middleton’s royal baby”, rather as we would say “Nigella Lawson’s clementine cake”.

And no one seems to mind that the much-published piece itself is a reprising of the rather remarkable bit of news that Tom Sykes, aka “the royalist”, unearthed for The Daily Beast 20 days ago.

His snippet “Royal Baby Is First Person To Get a Wikipedia Page Before It Is Born”, reported that William and Kate’s unborn child had “become the first person to get a wikipedia page before it is born.”