Do we know which cases will cause a media frenzy?
the true crime that's worth your time
Could we have predicted the Petito media tsunami — and can we predict the next one? We and everyone else in the space have talked a lot in the last week or so about The Missing White Woman, the factors besides Gabby Petito’s not being a woman of color that may have amped up the coverage frenzy (VF’s Delia Cai notes the possible effects of Petito and Brian Laundrie’s influencer status on the story), how the super-saturation point with this case compares with other cases like OJ or Jodi Arias, on and on.
But is there a way to predict whether a given case will blow up like this one has? And if so, should we…do anything about that? I realize we’re probably contributing to the problem in this instance, and I apologize, but I’m interested in your answers. I pulled down Popular Crime and looked at Bill James’s proposed rubric for popular-crime cases — basically, an analog algorithm for the various factors that make a case compelling to the public, and a number indicating how dominant the story became — and the Petito story has at least four of the 18 proposed elements (adventure story, missing person, mystery story, and tabloid elements), and arguable three more. And it’s at least a nine out of a possible ten in terms of ubiquity, at least right now.
James’s sense of what drives coverage can be Boomer-based and not terribly inclusive, but it’s helpful, I think, as a starting point to think about why certain stories blow up and others fly under the radar — and by extension, how we can separate signal from noise when it comes to a story’s significance. I can get more granular about James’s list etc. in the comments if anyone would like me to; for now, let’s talk about what we might call a case-saturation algorithm, what we might think it measures for, and how it might guide our consumption. — SDB