In my 1998 essay on trendspotting (yes, I'm linking to it again; what of it?), I wrote: "How does a trend story come to be? At Time, insiders say, the custom is for writers and editors in New York to sketch trends at editorial meetings in their offices, then call on reporters in the field to document them. Sometimes the initial idea can be traced to a story in New York or The New York Times. Otherwise, editors extrapolate national trends from their own small world of other writers and editors. 'I'm surprised they haven't done a trend story on working late and sending out for Chinese food,' quips the former stringer, 'because everybody they know does this.'"
Now there's new evidence for this phenomenon in a remarkable investigation by Fishbowl LA, which uses Friendster to trace the names in a recent NYT Styles story. Bonus points to FishLA for dubbing Friendster "the craigslist of our generation." [via Fishbowl NY]
