Dead News

Where do old news stories go to die?

"Whatever happened to 'Bumvertising'?" I wondered. For those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about, a Seattle businessman hit on the idea of giving panhandlers one of his signs to hold, along with their own. For this, he hands over a free lunch, and between one and five dollars. The story (and the resulting teapot tempest that masqueraded as a controversy) first broke in 2005 on the national news cycle (ABC, the Daily Show, and others picked it up and ran with it), and there hasn't been much about it since then.

So much of our news a flash in the pan these days that there are all sorts of stories like this wandering the back woods of the Internet. Like the story out of Canada that nearly every pedophile that the Toronto police nabbed between 2001 and 2005 was "a hardcore Trekkie." Now you see it, now you don't. Where do they go? Every so often, you come across an interesting story, and then can go back a few months later and get the newest update. But many of them fade in perpetual obscurity as the latest Lindsay Lohan meltdown or wannabe terrorist plot grabs the headlines by the neck.

I can see this trackless graveyard, littered with the tombstones of old stories that seemed to fade away before coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Occasionally I wander through there, drawn by something that caught my interest years ago, before being filed away in Limbo. One of these days, maybe I'll stumble across another mourner, and I'll ask them who, if anyone, cares for all of the lonely graves.