the trend towards entertainment news
An interesting story on the Newsbreak website by Aries Rufo, entitled "Changing media landscape sidelines labor stories" points to a growing trend: "less and less stories about work" and more and more stories on entertainment.
Quoting National Federation Italian Press President Roberto Natale, the story says that one of the causes is of this phenomenon is journalists and the owners of media organizations abdicating their "social role."
BBC's Steve Schifferes says the rise of the 24-hour news service also has something to do with it, as it lends itself to more "superficial" content.
The irony should not be lost on anyone. What Natale and Schifferes are saying here is that the culprits are 1) the gatekeepers themselves -- that is, those who determine what news is -- and 2) the media through which the news is transmitted.
Is this an international phenomenon? Even without hard figures, one would agree that there seems to be more showbiz news on local TV and print media than, say, even 5 years ago.
This might not necessarily mean that media organizations and practitioners are going soft. In the spirit of fairness, it would help to remember that the news industry does not exist in a vacuum. There is the audience, with its preferences for TV (and perhaps increasingly, the Internet) and for light news are a key factor here.
And then there is the availability of all sorts of information. What previously had to be dug up, researched, and reported by a resourceful and hardworking journalist can now be easily accessed online. With the gatekeeper function now in the hands of anyone with a computer and Internet connection, any information is now being passed off as news.
For now, it's hard to say where this is going, or what kind of news coverage we will have 5 years from now. It's a trend, after all.
Let's hope that's all it is -- a trend.
