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Times couch potato Virginia Heffernan can finally sleep at night: Lonelygirl15 — AKA Bree, a YouTube user whose video diaries of her life as an beautiful, home-schooled nerd captured the hearts of chronic masturbators near and far — has been definitively exposed as a fake, a calculated effort to create an online drama in hopes of developing a movie from the resulting buzz. You care, right? Maybe someone in marketing should, because at one point, over 700,000 YouTube views were devoted to this girl. On her corporate blog Screens, Heffernan has made Lonelygirl15 into her great white whale, first proclaiming the girl deserving of her own television show (July 28); since then, Heff's devoted 15 posts to the cult of Bree. And today, finally, Lonelygirl15 earns her place in the "real news" pantheon with Heffernan's story published on actual newsprint.

Congrats, Heff — you did it! You blogged your way into a bona fide Times story! Live the dream, lady!

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn't [NYT]
Lonelygirl15 [Screens]