However heavy the web traffic, Inquirer.net has never nearly crashed until three weeks ago.
Caty Petersen’s series of articles on the mysterious provenance of her Russian grandmother was both so popular and so polarizing it nearly crippled the Inquirer website.
On the days Petersen’s first two articles came out (May 13 and 14), there was an “unusual spike in requests to access” the site, according to Abelardo Ulanday, Inquirer.net’s editor in chief. The technical department, he added, even suspected there was an attempt to hack the site, though they couldn’t determine the location of the supposed offender(s).
For the period May 13-19, the same week Jessica Sanchez reached the finals of “American Idol,” the first of Petersen’s articles was the most viewed on the Inquirer.net, with over 120,000 unique visitors (in contrast, the Sanchez story had only 71,000+) and nearly 78,000 Facebook shares. It generated over 800 comments in the same period. (As of this writing, it has been shared 84,000 times online.)
Not a few of us scoffed when we first read the Filipina woman’s account of her search for her Russian grandmother’s roots, with clues that led ostensibly to her being the long-missing Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, the youngest daughter of the last Russian czar.
Some have either read about or seen the National Geographic documentary on how Anastasia’s bones and DNA have been positively identified, thus proving she had, indeed, been killed with the rest of her royal family on that tragic night in 1918. There was just no way she could’ve escaped the Bolsheviks, boarded a ship incognito, wound up in Manila, and married and raised a family with a local!
And yet, we had to admit Petersen’s account, if fantastical, made for such a compelling read. We were tempted to abandon logic and reason: Could the scientists have been wrong? Could there have been a cover-up? You know, those conspiracy theories.
But then she wrote about her emotional meeting with a spiritual medium in the second installment of her story, supposedly bolstering the idea of her Lola Puti’s possible royal lineage, and she had lost us. What a way to complicate an already convoluted plot!
Far from kind
While the story was widely read, the readers’ comments were far from kind. They questioned the Inquirer’s journalistic judgment, first, for putting the story out, and second, on the front page at that. (Same arguments also surfaced on the blogosphere.)
The paper was also criticized for not publishing at least a sidebar that showed the 2009 forensic findings which dashed all possibilities that Petersen’s grandmother could be Anastasia. (An article on the forensic findings came out on May 16, three days after Petersen’s front-page article.) Not a few likened this paper to National Enquirer, an American supermarket tabloid that’s known for gossip and sensationalized stories.
There were those who rooted for Petersen’s search for her Russian roots, but at least half of the online readers also accused her of delusion—in all sorts of colorful language. They cited various sources, including the forensic evidence, to debunk Petersen’s claim.
Going over a thousand-plus comments on all of Petersen’s three articles—she replied to readers’ reactions on May 20—is like wading through sewage: Something viscous and putrid is bound to stick.
While there were some who presented intelligent and valid points for discourse, most of the comments were just hopelessly daft (one wrote she was “proud” that Anastasia lived in the Philippines, and another one urged Petersen to continue her “saga,” comments that were understandably met by much ridicule).
As expected, there was the attendant trolling and name-calling. Then you realize it’s practically the same comment posters over and over, camped out on the site to belabor the same points and non-points over and over.
But whatever the turnout of Petersen’s search, people are captivated with her tale. And with her, however reluctant, they await for answers. Dare we say, even those who have called her names.
