Where is the Balance?

Where is the balance?  Reading the latest chapter from our Principles of Convergent Journalism book, I wanted to find inspiration for this blog post, so I went to the Orlando Sentinel’s web page looking for a local story that might peak my interest and give me some material to relate to what I just read.  Doing this made me realize that though the book covers what is news and then goes on to correlate blogging, texting and socializing as new forms of online news coverage, the Orlando Sentinel is not a very “newsy” paper or online destination.  The top stories could be considered news, in that they cover the George Zimmerman case, the DNC Convention, and Hurricane Leslie which had just recently been upgraded to that status, but accompanying these stories made me feel like I was watching the 11pm newscast, as it is mentions of scams, assaults, a gossip articles.
To make matters worse there are galleries of photos consisting of celebs at Disney, local mugshots and a section where readers are supposed to guess that mustache.  What is the purpose of the local news source now?  The Orlando Sentinel is owned by a larger multimedia company where the site can now be filled with articles from their hundreds of writers, but does it benefit the reader?  Rightly, the book goes on to mention that traditional newspapers also dabbled in “sensational gossip, rumor, opinion and innuendo”, but it is my opinion that these newspapers did not go into the depth that I see on Orlando Sentinel’s site.
To be fair, there are plenty of great news sources out there.  The New York Times, The Economist, and the BBC to name a few.  What is the point of the local news source nowadays and what purpose does it serve in our lives now?  When does the gluttony of fluff finally outweigh the credibility?  These are all questions that I have been asking for a long time and I have many opinions on them, but very few definitive answers, kind of like the local news source.