31st
Anatomy of a crisis
I love when TMZ goes on all-hands-on-deck, flashing-siren full alert, like it did last night/this morning with Britney Spears’s most recent journey to the psychiatric ward.
The coverage started at 2:59 a.m. (EST) with a post entitled “Cops Back at Britney’s House.”
Then there were posts at 3:36 (“Britney About to be Temporarily Committed”), 4:02 (“Britney Shrink Calls Cops”), 4:09 (“No Suicide Call from Brit’s House”), 4:16 (“Cops Use Code in Britney Case”), 4:20 (“UCLA, Here Britney Comes”), 4:29 (“Alli and the Ambulance Arrive at Brit’s”), 4:30 (“Britney’s Medical Motorcade”), 4:31 (“Poppa Spears Silent at Hospital”), 4:32 (“Sam Shows Up at Brit’s Committal”), and 4:34 (“Brit Went Willingly”). There was a 2-hour pause until the next post at 6:36 (“Britney Was Cucumber Calm—Almost Kumbaya“—I didn’t realize that was an adjective!), and then the site was off and running again: 6:40 (“Bitter Fight Over Brit at Hospital”), 6:42 (“Mama Spears at Hospital—Britney’s O.K.”), 7:12 (“How Britney’s Second Psychiatric Hold Went Down”), 8:27 (“Britney Officially on Psychiatric Hold”), and the most recent post, at 9:20 (“Parents to Sam: She’s Ours Now”).
So that’s 17 posts in a little more than six hours—in the middle of the night (it’s still only about 6:30 in LA). This kind of stuff is what TMZ is cut out for. It’s a well-established story with a well-established cast of characters (“Brit,” “Sam,” “Poppa Spears,” “Alli,” etc.), and they’re able to cover it basically in real time. Say whatever you want about TMZ, but that is HARD.
