Zachary Seward chats with author Bill Wasik about the "nanostory".
During the 2008 presidential campaign, The Boston Globe ran a 10-part profile of its hometown candidate, Mitt Romney, but the only piece of that reporting to catch much attention was the colorful tale of poor Seamus, the Romney family dog who was tied to the roof.
.... Wasik coins the term “nanostory” to describe how blogs seized on the Seamus anecdote and turned it into the hottest story of the campaign for two weeks in the summer of 2007.... In the process, the Globe undoubtedly lost traffic to political blogs, including many by other mainstream news organizations, that chose to focus on the nanostory.
The original Globe story doesn’t even appear in the first 10 pages of results on a Google search for “mitt romney dog.”
