And yet I post about it.
I’m referring to this headline on CNN: “News sites stay up during Jackson memorial”
That’s what’s supposed to happen, isn’t it? Isn’t news supposed to be when something unexpected happens? When the news sites crashed a couple weeks ago, okay, that was news.
This is, I don’t know, wither the lamest follow-up storyever, or self-congratulatory drivel. If my tiny little site on a shared hosting server stayed up during a flood of 90+ million visitors, okay, that’s news. But CNN? Come on. They’re the corporate big boys with real servers.
I’ve noticed over the past few years more and more of these stories that shouldn’t be stories. The Octomom. The actual day of the DTV switch over. Steve Jobs’ health. Why, James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” (at opinionjournal.com) even has a section called “Bottom Stories of the Day” full of non-stories. Heck, celebrity deaths in general fit this category.
I’m not talking about posts on blogs, mind you (mine included). I’m talking about on “official,” main-stream news sites.
I think this era of non-stop 24-hour-a-day news on multiple TV channels, radio stations, and websites has created this need to report on something, anything, just to fill up the airtime/web space so that more than just the same few stories get reported. Or maybe it’s scoop mentality: “Ah-ha! The competition isn’t reporting on X, we’ll report it first!”.
And I don’t think it will ever go away.
And yet, I would very much like to start a “new media” news network. Le sigh.
