Despite promise of new tech, today’s journalism is just trivia

By David McElroy · December 16, 2011

When I was a little boy, I was an avid newspaper reader. As far back as I can remember, I would scour the newspaper every day, looking at the stories, pictures and (especially) “the funnies.” It always amazed me to realize that there was exactly enough news to fill all the pages.

When I finally started working on newspapers myself, I found out the awful truth. Stories were savagely cut to fit the space available. If an ad size changed, a story had to change to fit the space left over. The news wasn’t the primary purpose of the paper. The ads were. The news content existed only to attract readers to look at the ads.

The New York Times’ famous slogan is, “All the news that’s fit to print,” but when I was an editor, we sometimes said our slogan was, “All the news that fits, we print.”

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’m increasingly aware that the explosion of available “news hole” for media outlets hasn’t resulted in better news for the public. Instead, it’s resulted in financially struggling media companies spreading their resources even thinner — which has produced shallow content with little original reporting and even less in the way of context.

Here’s an example. The local newspaper here is a typical medium-big metro newspaper owned by the Newhouse chain (with the same poorly designed website that all of the Newhouse papers use). I read a story there earlier today that’s a perfect example of news outlets just filling up space. Take a look. It’s called, “Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport sees less traffic in October, November.” Interesting, huh?

In this story, you learn that the number of passengers who flew through the airport dropped slightly for the past couple of months. What does this mean? Does it matter? Why are they telling me? I don’t have answers to any of those questions. They’re giving me random trivia without context and without giving me any reason to think I should find it important. It’s useless.

Why do these useless stories get written and published? In my experience, it’s typically for one of a couple of reasons. It could be that a desperate reporter looking for a story once found a press release from the airport with these statistics and he ran with it because he had nothing else to turn in. Or it could be that someone in newspaper management — the publisher or someone else tied to the business community — told some editor that it was going to be a required story. Then it became something that the newsroom had to produce and publish to please that person — without regard to the story’s importance or context or anything like that.

The Internet has an infinite amount of “space.” In the old days, if we printed more news, we needed more paper. There are no such limitations now. So journalists are expected to fill up that almost-infinite space with thinner and thinner nothingness. The resulting “journalism” is filled with trivia, but very little understanding or context. There’s little to make it worth any more than a quick scan.

I don’t run a newspaper anymore, but if I did, I’d try to make it more like a magazine — very short news summaries and much longer pieces on what things mean. What’s really going on.

That’s not going to happen, though, because many readers are upset to be given a realistic picture of the world around them. They prefer to stare at their televisions or skim through websites, picking up trivia and believing they’re informed.

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Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

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