Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime
Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in both its legacy and citizen varieties. By the time Ashleigh Banfield named a suspect in the case on her podcast, by the time Megyn Kelly had structured coverage around episode titles such as “Nest Camera Questions, Savannah Stalker Possibilities and Bitcoin Rumblings,” by the time dozens of true-crime influencers had weighed in, the kidnapping of
