While researching for something to write about this week, I immediately went to CNN.com. Every story I wanted to read immediately took me to a video about the story, rather than a written story. Upon looking further into CNN.com I realized most of their stories were videos with very little to actually read. People don’t seem to want to take a little effort to read anymore so news outlets won’t take the effort to write them anymore.
Also what is considered news has changed quite a lot too. As I am writing this, the top stories from CNN according to Facebook are “Bacon lovers unite for Bacon Fest” and “Chain of cat feces can harm humans, sea otters.” While one of these can be considered news for humans, sea otters, seriously the highest trending topic is bacon fest. The story on bacon fest was also just a link to a video about bacon fest.
24 hour news coverage is really unnecessary, and up to the minute internet coverage is even more unnecessary. I understand that at certain times it’s good to have up to the minute news. When there are natural disasters, or a world leader dies, up to the minute coverage is important so that whenever anyone turns on their TV or computer they will be able to be in the loop. I know in situations like that I can almost always immediately find the story on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC etc. If for some reason I can’t find it on TV, the internet will be buzzing with the story. However this will really only cover possibly 1% of the news reported in a year. The other 99% of the time seems to be filled with cat crap and fried pigs.
Like I said in my previous post about Whitney Houston’s death, 24 hour news outlets need to fill up a lot of time. This past week they killed some time with a 168 hour vigil for Mrs. Houston. All I personally needed to know was that she had died, and possibly where, when and how if I was a little curious. That should really only fill a 1 minute story and one news article. That really means 167.983 hours were just an exercise in futility. Actually that’s not fair to them, they may have had to repeat the where, when, why and how of her death at the top of the hour, so that would be about 168 minutes of actual coverage.
The main purpose of this blog post before I started rambling to meet the four hundred word minimum is that when I click on a news article I want to read the article, not see a video.