Inside the Fan Insanity Unleashed by The Life of a Showgirl

"When I worked as a Digital Culture Reporter at Business Insider, we had an expression for how we'd cover the buzziest new stories: Flood the zone. Like a faulty fire hydrant, or a vacuum cleaner whizzing up and down with the uncontrollable hysteria of a feral raccoon, our directive was to suck up as many clicks as possible through every angle imaginable."

"Taylor Swift is the Titan submersible implosion of music journalism-or a series of them, or one endless sustained ultrabuzz spectacle-driving a rapturous surge of media coverage by churning out so much material. It's an increasingly rare kind of cultural domination-even at the height of the Beatles or Michael Jackson, there was always a pantheon of other deities. Swift has a monopoly on monoculture, she's the Elon Musk super-entrepreneur of music. It's why Gannett, the country's biggest newspaper chain, hired a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter."

"There have been hundreds of positive and punitive articles published about her online since The Life of a Showgirl was released on Friday. People alone has written dozens in the last week, from individual pieces cataloging every song to a story written about a single comment Travis Kelce left on an Instagram post made by Kameron Saunders, a backup dancer in the the video for Swift's song "Fate of Ophelia." ("You killed it as always Kam!!" he wrote. That's the story.)"

Newsrooms employ a "flood the zone" tactic to saturate coverage of the buzziest stories, prioritizing clicks across many angles. That approach appeared during Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Titan submersible implosion, prompting reporters across beats to pivot coverage. Social platforms fueled content like Zelenskyy fancams and TikTok misinformation using fake violent audios. Taylor Swift generates continuous, dominant media attention that resembles repeated spectacles, producing a monocultural hold on music journalism. Major outlets have assigned dedicated coverage, and hundreds of both celebratory and critical pieces followed the release of The Life of a Showgirl, including highly granular stories.

Read at Pitchfork