Even ignoring Paris Hilton makes news

We felt a little sheepish that the ban was over, and braced ourselves for the comments that would come when people realized it wasn't permanent.

We also learned that Lloyd Grove, former columnist for the New York Daily News, had attempted a much longer Paris Hilton blackout. He began it a year into his "Lowdown" column and stuck to it, he says, for two years until the column was discontinued last October — except for a blind item (no names) about Hilton crashing a pre-Oscar party.

So was Grove attempting to raise the level of discourse in our society by focusing on truly newsworthy subjects?

Well, not really. "The blackout was a really heartfelt attempt on my part," he says, "to get publicity for myself."

A trait that Hilton, it must be said, has turned into an art. Grove thinks the so-called "celebutante" achieved her unique brand of fame because she boasts an irresistible set of traits: wealth, a big name, beauty with a "downmarket" appeal, and a tendency to seem ... oversexed. "This is what mainstream society celebrates," he says. "She is, in the worst sense, the best expression of the maxim that no bad deed goes unpunished in our pop culture."

One measure of Hilton's fame: She was No. 5 last year on the Yahoo Buzz Index, a list of overall top searches on the Web site (her ever-so-brief buddy Spears is a perennial No. 1).

Another is that US Weekly has at least a mention or a photo in just about every issue. "People now come to expect to see pictures of her," says Caroline Schaefer, deputy editor of the celebrity magazine. "They're intrigued by her unshakable self-esteem. People are fascinated by that."

Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, decries the "one-size-fits-all disease" afflicting media outlets, who feel that "everybody's covering it, so we must, too." Even The New York Times, he noted, had substantial coverage of a hearing concerning where Anna Nicole Smith — perhaps the one person who rivaled Hilton in terms of fame for fame's sake — would be buried.

"That disease leads to the Paris Hilton virus spreading through the news industry," says Jarvis, who puts out the BuzzMachine blog.

So what have we learned from the ban? "It's hard to tell what this really changes, since we didn't have to make any hard decisions," says Jesse Washington, AP's entertainment editor. "So we'll continue to use our news judgment on each item, individually."

Which means that for the immediate future, if not always, we'll still have Paris.