Cheap? You Judge

So, the opossum Heidi made it on the main page of YLE News tonight. Why is Heidi the opossum special, you might wonder - well, she's not, her eyes are crooked and that is all.

Actually, I feel doing this cheapens my own site. Every time YLE picks up something completely useless for their main page and I post about I feel like picking on a retard. We've long since established they don't know any better and they can't help it. Also, it feels like a cheap outlet if I don't have a serious news post to point out, like the last one on Haiti

Now there might be a counterpoint or two floating around. First, you might claim the joke at the end of a news reel serves a purpose and that there's a long history for it and that it increases the amount of viewers for the actual news. This held true in the age of television, but not the Internet, why?

Today a newsreader selects a news website because he or she is interested in the news. They do not necessarily seek cute-animals-on-demand, as they can do that any time on youtube or any number of other sites. When you go to a news website you want news. If you play the tradition card, you need to understand how the Internet is not the television and that readership and content is not necessarily dependent on the same factors. Think about it - the news reel at 22:00 ends in a joke and you feel good at the end because you watched the whole thing. Reading Internet news you don't have a single cohesive transmission, you pick and choose, and this brings us back to the first point; news websites should offer news instead of cutesy crap.

I also realize some viewers might want to see animal shenanigans amid news. There are various online sites making their livelihood out of it, so why shouldn't news providers do it too? Because our main national news provider should not aim for the lowest common denominator, they should aim to bring us quality news. The yellow press exist to fill that function, entertainment news.