In order to tell you the following story I’m going to have to make an embarrassing admission: I LexisNexis myself every day. That is to say, I plug my own name into LexisNexis, the online cuttings service, to see if any stories have appeared about me in the past 24 hours. In terms of vanity, it is one up from Googling yourself since it includes sources — like the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary — that are not picked up by Google. However, unlike Google, it is not free. Conducting a search does not cost anything, but if you want to read any of the ‘results’ you have to pay a charge of $1.50/article. The upshot is that I never hit the ‘purchase’ button unless I am completely satisfied that the article in question is about me and not some other ‘Toby Young’.
In the past, this daily trawl of the world’s newspapers and magazines has produced some strange results, but none as strange as the following headline from the Associated Press on 13 February 2006: ‘Man convicted in ’96 killing escapes from Lansing’.
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