"This isn't news". Those three words haunt me. I have seen them at least twenty times a day for the past three-and-a-half years. I've even started seeing them in my nightmares, splattered on my walls in Internet blood.
Tuesday was a typical example; we ran a story about David and Victoria Beckham's son, Romeo, being named as one of Britain's best dressed men by GQ magazine. We ran this in our ?Oddly Enough' section based on the fact it's strange for an eight-year-old boy to be considered a fashion icon, even stranger when you consider that he probably doesn't dress himself, and most obviously of all - he's not a man either.����
On Twitter the words were there again. They'd followed me from the comment section of articles onto social media. My tweet was commented on or re-tweeted ten times.� Of those ten, two commentators were unhappy at my decision to post the link. I can be callous like that sometimes if truth be told.
?WHO GIVES A FLYING F***????' and ?U SUCK' were the highlights of one response. While another tried to goad me into early retirement: ?And is this what u call news? Thinking about retirement? Go 4it'.
While I don't normally give much credence to people who write all in capitals or use phrases such as ?go 4it' when they have enough space to write ?go for it' I felt the need to defend myself in this instance. Perhaps it's because those words have been constantly nailed into my brain and I've finally snapped or perhaps it's because I want some of our readers to understand why we run certain stories.
First of all, why should we care what some magazine thinks? We shouldn't necessarily, but the fact is that some publications have carved themselves into authoritative figures in their industries. Forbes magazine is held in high esteem in the financial world, likewise with Which? in the consumer market and so too with GQ on matters of men's fashion. Let me put it this way, we won't be running any stories on what Heat magazine thinks about Sienna Miller's tan lines any time soon but if National Geographic runs a story about a new jungle being discovered, we're interested.
To the criticism of ?this isn't news'. There are two types of news, there?s hard news and there's light news. If readers were pumped full of hard news every day we'd be a nation of very solemn individuals, I can promise you that. That's why it's important to run videos of a deer being rescued or of a man pretending to be a superhero occasionally. Think of it as a morale boost. Of course it's important to run hard news stories too, and they take priority without fail, but without the light stories to balance it out we'd all go crazy.
The rise of ?infotainment' shouldn't be a surprise to anyone by now, it's been steadily progressing in the mainstream media for the last decade or more. Audiences often complain at the dumbing down of news, whether it be online, print or broadcast, but the fact is news outlets just got better at understanding what stories people are more likely to engage with and that's any information organisation's ultimate goal. Simply put, more people watch, click, listen to lighter news than they do with hard news, so media companies started to deliver more of them. A simple case of supply and demand. Infotainment will never replace hard news but it will always be there like a useful sidekick.
The ?this isn't news' army is a tiny proportion of readers, and I'm talking across all publications not just Yahoo!. The behaviour of people who comment on news articles is generally negative, if people are happy with something they usually don't feel the need to say anything. That's just the way we are.
If you don't think a story is newsworthy then don't read it. There is an endless supply of what you may call real news stories. All you have to do is look.
Chat about this story w/ Talkita
