I complain a lot about the state of modern journalism but I have to admit, I’m no better than the rest of them.
Today, while looking through the news to find something worth writing about, I got suckered into lists of “The World’s Strangest Cities” (the one in China was really more of a theme park then a city and the one in Nebraska was just plain dull) and “The Ten Professions In Which You’re Most Likely to Hook Up With a Colleague” which was probably completely bogus. Try “10 professions the practitioners of which are most likely to brag about hooking up with co-workers whether they actually have or not.” People lie all the time and there’s no reason to think they don’t lie on surveys.
I also read an article on a coat Lindsay Lohan wore (Headline “You won’t believe……!”) which was very disappointing because it totally looked like a normal coat to me, and an article headlined “Burglar Disguises Himself as the Sun” but when you went to the article it had no such story…guy was arrested for stealing a towel, and there was some strange wording in the police report, but nobody knew what it was actually about.
Still, in some editorial office, there is an editor who is approving this stuff. Instead of telling the reporter to go out and get some real information, they scan through it and say “well, we can put a really cool headline on the top of this.”
I can understand, there is a lot of space to fill, in our fast paced internet world billions of words are published daily and everybody wants to make sure they get their words slotted in, submitted to the pool of conversation, and that takes precedence over whether the story is important, or even accurate. Also, as long as people keep clicking on it and reading it, they’re going to keep writing it.
I just need to filter my choices better, that’s all.
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