On Thursday, a couple of llamas got loose in Arizona. A llama chase ensued. As The Washington Post does whenever a llama crisis occurs, we dispatched our Llama Emergency Response Team — a group of reporters ready to deploy in just these types of situations — to provide readers with the most comprehensive and detailed report on this breaking news.
Some people enjoyed this idea and the overall llama coverage. Some people did not. Some people just focused on the number of people it takes to report a story of this magnitude. Here is a sampling of responses:
Washington Post byline count: 5 bylines to cover llamas on the lose in Arizona. 3 bylines to cover Metro catching fire and killing someone.
— Ginger Gibson (@GingerGibson) February 26, 2015
The Reporter-to-Llama Ratio: 2.5-to-1. Seems reasonable. pic.twitter.com/xbKEZx5yO8 (h/t @JuddLegum)
— Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) February 26, 2015
Proud to work for a news org that doesn't have llamas on its home page. Yet.
— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) February 26, 2015
Six bylines on this llama story. Six. http://t.co/70FsxUg0Vl
— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) February 27, 2015
5 bylines on the @wapo #llamas story. h/t @peterlattman http://t.co/NfvnZsPKIc
— Emily Steel (@emilysteel) February 26, 2015
FIVE bylines for a @washingtonpost story on the escaped llamas. Not a joke. http://t.co/0diIeVNgnm
— Matthew Frightbach (@fbihop) February 26, 2015
Wash Post's BREAKING NEWS story about two runaway llamas took five reporters and is mostly gifs (thx @rpmarshall80) http://t.co/eZALnzpl2s
— Sylvia Carignan (@SylviaCarignan) February 26, 2015
Two llamas, five bylines. http://t.co/MxvTAWTY4e
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) February 26, 2015
Someone’s high over there RT @abeaujon: Washington Post has 5 reporters on the #llama story http://t.co/MbvOCpZ09x http://t.co/f2z142VDxw
— 🎃Bansheethan Rothstein🎃 (@ethanrothstein) February 26, 2015
This story has three bylines per llama. Mind blown http://t.co/IWJvhLKwpl
— Alberto Nardelli (@AlbertoNardelli) February 27, 2015
The @washingtonpost had five reporters on the #llamadrama story: http://t.co/JAW6YN1gh3 pic.twitter.com/hkw5FqlnVy
— Andrew Peng (@TheAPJournalist) February 26, 2015
The llama escape was followed, several hours later, by a cultural Ragnarok waged over the color of a dress. This brought out the usual shaming from people appalled that anyone was devoting any thought to something as trivial as a dress (you should all know that Alyssa Milano and Ronan Farrow are very disappointed in you; not mad, just disappointed).
This type of criticism — attention-policing, as Megan Garber of the Atlantic put it on Friday morning — typically follows the emergence and dissemination of any meme. I can’t believe you’re talking about a dress when there are flesh-eating viruses out there just waiting to take our jobs and manually retweet things and text during movies. (Drew Magary collected a bunch of these tweets at Deadspin.)
Some people care about the same things as you. Some people don’t. Some people see white and gold, others see blue and black, others still don’t really care but also think it is obviously blue. You could explain this away as simple differences in taste, or perhaps the innate human ability to understand and pay attention to more than one thing at once, perhaps many things at once, perhaps even simultaneously being aware of a number of things of varying degrees of seriousness and import.
Or you could be mad! The important thing to remember is that the next time llamas are on the loose, we have at least a dozen journalists on standby.
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