Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin, Vanity Fair, interlopers and spoilers and how to charge for slim pickings

(Above: Vanity Fair's teaser trailer available on their site).

Gossip about the famous is a sure fire best seller, and Sarah Palin is a gossip's delight.

But the revelations by Levi Johnston in his new sitcom pitch for "Life with the Palins" raises some interesting questions about how well the media might stick together when one team gets an exclusive and the other teams get snarky.

Vanity Fair is the rag which has delivered the goods, an exclusive piece by Levi Johnston, and in its online version, it's offered up a sneak preview under the header Levi Johnston: "Me and Mrs. Palin".

It also offers a behind-the-scenes video of Mark Seliger's photo shoot with the plucky Alaskan lad, but it seems like this is all just bait on the hook, designed to send people rushing off to buy the October issue, which hits newsstands in New York and LA on September 2 and nationwide on September 8th.

Amongst the tasty tidbits:

Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make “triple the money.” It was, to her, “not as hard.” She would blatantly say, “I want to just take this money and quit being governor.” She started to say it frequently, but she didn’t know how to do it. When she came home from work, it seemed like she was more and more stressed out.

For this I should buy the magazine? To learn more?

In the meantime, Gail Collins in The New York Times has clearly purchased the magazine, and done a gloss on the article under the header The Revenge of Levi, which opens "For the first time in my life, I feel sympathy for Sarah Palin".

Collins proceeds to dump on Johnston from a great height as she works her way through the domestic politics in the Palin family, as interpreted by Johnston. It sounds like a train wreck waiting for a more full expression of itself on Jerry Springer. Or perhaps an opera featuring Jerry Springer and Levi.

About the only thing that gets Collins excited is Johnston's claim that Palin doesn't know how to shoot a gun, and since that seems to be one of Johnston's few life skills, she gives him credit as a potentially trustworthy source on the matter.

But my interest is in the matter of claim jumping. Here's Vanity Fair making a pitch for subscriber and buyer dollars, and along comes Collins to steal their thunder.

Put her borrowings up alongside the bait offered online by Vanity Fair, and you get a 'no thanks, this is private family stuff', of no interest or relevance to political debates, unless of course you think of politics as an extension of the entertainment game (as the Daily Telegraph did, when they purported public interest in John Della Bosca's love life, when really it was just a chance to dig into the business of an older consenting adult making out with a younger consenting adult in what really is private business).

And next thing you know, The Age has picked up the Collins' piece, and given it a new header, just to show that the subbies are hard at work generating original Australian content. This time it's Boyfriend scorned shoots mouth off but misses the target.

So they too are spoiling the broth for Vanity Fair, with a story filling up their own pages, which is in any case only a click away in the New York Times for someone able to complete free registration and use a mouse.

Now down the track when everyone wants to start charging for content, how is all this filching and cross linking going to be brought under control? And how is the desire to trump a rival's story going to be abandoned, against the instinct of every columnist seeking a quick ramp up on a pre-existing story (as I'm doing right now, by conflating Vanity Fair and The New York Times).

Already most of these publications don't provide links to rival stories - why allow a reader to stray off site when you can keep reader reading your own version of the story, and hopefully then keep them inside your tent. And each want their own exclusives, and hate their rivals getting ahead in the game.

And yes if you want to look further this is not an isolated bit of action in relation to this steory. See Excerpts from Levi Johnston's Vanity Fair Interview, released in Time on September 2, 2009, with an obligatory tip of the hat to VF, or similar short rips such as US News & World Report's piece by Robert Schlesinger The Media Loves Sarah Palin, Thanks to Levi Johnston and Vanity Fair, who does coverage of sundry media takes on the story, and so on down the line, with a google search for "Levi Johnston Vanity Fair" turning up some 713 related news articles at time of writing.

When the story's hot, it spreads across the intertubes like a case of measles. So how to inoculate, how to prevent the spread of the virus, how to keep the exclusive exclusive and charge the punters for the content, and not have spoilers and interlopers turn up to ruin the party?

It'll be interesting to see what answer News Corp comes up with in the next six months, but me, I don't have a clue.

They'll have to do better than Vanity Fair. No sale here, not when I've had the pickings from a dozen other supplier, and they came up slim ...

But just in case you're beguiled, here's what to look for on the newsstands ...