Can I Get a Story Worth Clicking For?

With so many newsworthy events to learn about, such as updates on the upcoming presidential election or the progression of the impeachment proceedings, who really has the time or desire to waste precious minutes of their lives reading about someone quitting their job? I’m serious, that’s the type of stories we are getting in today’s media climate, which to me seems utterly ridiculous.

Case in point – a producer on a TV show side hugged a fellow employee. She felt uncomfortable and brought up to HR, requesting he complete a sensitivity training. The producer willingly complied. She said she’s happy with the outcome. The end. Seriously, that’s all that happened, so why on earth would this be a story?

A story like this shouldn’t get any attention at all. It isn’t even newsworthy. It seems that all media sources do today is take whatever mediocre story they can think of and come up with some salacious headline to get as many clicks as possible just to make money from advertisements. What happened to the days where news organizations strived to educate the world with interesting stories and important current events such as the unrest in Hong Kong?

The sad thing is that there are real people out there who have gone through truly terrible situations. Those sorts of things deserve our attention. However, what happened here is something that nobody needs to know about, nor cares about, but is filling up our media streams. This takes away from the truly noteworthy stories that people should be reading, which seems a bit unfair honestly.

A person complying with training and then a person eventually leaving a studio is nothing that denotes newsworthiness. This sort of thing happens every day in HR departments around the world. What would be news is if the person refused to do the training, but this is not the case at all. This is your basic HR success story, which happens at every company, every day.

I think the only reason this non-story is even in the media is because it involves CBS. I don’t know why the media has an infatuation with CBS, but I guess it’s a dog eat dog world in the media industry. Apparently, someone quitting a job at a studio is enough to get the other media competitors enough blood to go into a salacious misreporting frenzy.

While not every story needs to cover large political events, the stories we read should at least enrich our lives in some way. The headlines that capture our attention in the first place should be followed by content that is just as interesting to read. While stories about absolutely nothing might be easy to write and put out there, these companies that write it certainly aren’t going to win subscribers over that way. Eventually, the people who hunger for real content that makes a real impact in their lives are going to take their attention and their clicks elsewhere.