Ubiquitous news wire service The Associated Press distributed an internal memo on February 13th encouraging journalists not to cover ubiquitous celebrity do-nothing Paris Hilton for a week.

“Next week,” entertainment editor Jesse Washington wrote in an e-mail memo obtained by The Transom, “the print team is planning an unconventional experiment: We are NOT going to cover Paris Hilton.

“Barring any major, major news, we are not going to put a single word about Paris on the wire,” the memo continued. “If something does come up, big or small, we encourage discussions on whether we should write about it.”

[via Gawker]

They said the decision was hard and took a lot of discussion. They were able to hold out covering Paris for a little over a week, and forced themselves not to cover Brandon Davis’ drunken outburst at her birthday dinner. After Paris got arrested for driving with a suspended license, though, they gave up and ran the story, savoring every word.

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.)

[Lloyd] Grove [formerly of the NY Daily News] 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 unrewarded 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.

Lloyd Grove of the NY Daily News’ Lowdown column, which was cancelled in October, said he deliberately didn’t mention Hilton for two years because he wanted to get publicity. I know I don’t always cover stories about the milktoast heiress, but it’s hard not to mention her as Jeff Jarvis discussed because she’s freaking everywhere. There’s also something fascinating how she keeps on going no matter what happens. She’s was overheard bragging about how much money her sex tape made, and she was out working right after all her private medical records and drug-use videos came out on Paris Exposed. Apart from refusing to speak to photographers for one day she showed no outward reaction to the Paris Exposed scandal.

I know all about that phenomenon that Jeff Jarvis mentioned about how you have to cover the stories that are popular no matter how much they bug you. I’ll be reporting on Anna Nicole’s pink tasseled funeral shortly.

Here she is outside of a medical building on 2/28. What’s going on with her stomach in 2″>