The Associated Press, the world's largest news agency, decided to have some impish fun and not move any Paris Hilton stories for a week to see if anyone would suffer from withdrawal. The answer? Not really.

Some excerpts from the AP story on CTV.ca:

... Editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn't cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. After that, we'd take it day by day. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?

It turned out that people noticed plenty -- but not in the way that might have been expected. None of the tens of thousands of media outlets that depend on AP called in asking for a Paris Hilton story. No one felt a newsworthy event had been ignored. (To be fair, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary happened in the Hilton universe.)

The reaction was to the idea of the ban, not the effects of it. There was some internal hand-wringing. Some felt we were tinkering dangerously with the news. Whom, they asked, would we ban next? Others loved the idea. "I vote we do the same for North Korea," one AP writer said facetiously. ...

The ban started on Feb. 19.

Then Hilton was arrested on Feb. 27 for driving with a suspended license -- an offense that could conceivably lead to jail time because she may have violated conditions of a previous sentence. By that time, our blackout was over anyway, so reporting the development was an easy call. (On the flip side, we never got to see what repercussions there would have been if we hadn't.)

Also by then, an internal AP memo about the ban had found its way to the outside world. The New York Observer quoted it on Wednesday, and the Gawker.com gossip site linked to it. Howard Stern was heard mentioning the ban on his radio show, and calls came in from various news outlets asking us about it. On Editor and Publisher magazine's Web site, a reader wrote: "This is INCREDIBLE, finally a news organization that can see through this evil woman." And another: "You guys are my heroes!"

However, this "celebutante" did hit number five on the Yahoo buzz index last year. There seems to be a strange interest in certain circles to the minutiae of her life.

Flashing a glimpse of her muff as she climbs out of a limo is enough to generate headlines, even though it affects almost nobody. Really, Hilton has to find some amusement value in the fact that she's able to trigger news coverage with almost any trivial act.

More amazingly, the public's appetite for this vapid person (when someone's signature quote is "that's so hot," I think that's a fair assessment) does not appear to be dwindling.

In fact, fame for celebrity bad girls seems to be inversely proportional to achievement (Britney's at least sold some music).

Nobody seems to have any answers. I typed "why paris hilton is fascinating" into the Delphic Oracle of Google, and here's what I got:

So I guess we have to conclude that she's fascinating because ... er, she is!

But this (admittedly flawed) experiment implies to me that if she wasn't covered very intensely, she wouldn't be.

Afterthought

However, perhaps that's just the media snob in me talking.

And perhaps, the reason that people didn't complain more is that there's a virtually infinite number of places in the media universe to get a Paris fix -- for those so inclined.