About two years ago, I was seated at a dinner next to a young Time magazine reporter who was leaving the newsweekly to join a soon-to-be syndicated TV program called “Celebrity Justice.” As she was telling me this, I was scratching my head thinking that this show is taking the concept of “niche programming” to the limit. It will never succeed.
I was wrong. In fact, America can’t seem to get enough of celebrity trials, or any trials for that matter. It’s shadenfreude run amok. (Didn’t you catch the picture of Phil Spector and his latest do?) Nowhere do these trials have the potential to change an industry than those involving the Internet. Scott Kessler writing in Business Week lists the pivotal cases. “I’ve been covering Internet stocks for more than five years and cannot remember a time when legal disputes and resolutions were having a greater impact on the industry and its companies.”
Celebrity justice aside, the legal wrangling involving corporate misdoings or Elliot Spitzer quickly eat up the business news hole. The blogosphere, however, tells a different story. In it, AIG’s Hank Greenberg doesn’t hold a candle to an Internet-related case like the feds shuttering BitTorrent’s hub. (Score: AIG, 7431 postings; Bittorrent, 22,478 postings)