We live in a 24-hour news cycle, where media outlets deliver stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator. So stories types get cycled every year, which you could remove the names from the stories and publish them anew every year.
1) Apple product features and, especially, defects.
Apple products are cool. They work well. People like them. Apple might have sold 1 million iPad 2s after its launch. Yay! One out of every 300 people might have one. Or will in a few weeks. It's understandable that it would sell well, because they only cost $234,867. Middle-class parents are definitely lining up. And when I hear that the backlight on the device doesn't work properly, I feel for them. I really do.
Product defects often are important stories. Take the Toyota Prius. Most people did not own the car. But if a car is out of control, you don't have to own one for it to affect you. "Apple, I can't watch my Toy Story 3 download in the maximum possibly quality." I don't care; keep it off TV.
2) NCAA Tournament snubs
Every season people fly into a tirade because the NCAA selection committee declared their team to not be among the 37 best teams that were not good enough to win their conference tournaments. Including those champions, the teams missing from the bracket probably didn't crack the top 50.
Bummer. The 45th best team is not good enough to win the national championship. This isn't college football, thank goodness, where teams good enough to cut down the nets, so to speak, get left out every season, even unbeaten teams.
"Snubbed" teams can increase their chances by winning their conference tournament. Do that, and they get a guaranteed berth in the Big Dance. Because every conference (except the Ivy League) awards its auto bid to the tournament winner, and every team in every major conference plays in said tournament, every team has a chance to win the national title by winning every postseason game. "We're definitely one of the 50 best teams," should not be a rallying cry.
All snub stories-All-Stars, Oscar nominations, etc.-should be banned. Most people will never receive an Oscar nomination. Most actors will never receive an Oscar nomination. Hell, most good actors will never receive an Oscar nomination. Not getting an Oscar nod is the norm. The norm is not newsworthy.
3) Can ____ win ____ election?
Elections are not won with talent, game-planning and hustle like sports teams win games and championships. At least, not in the same sense. It's all about opinions, and the more recent the opinion the more important it is. Still, news agencies publish stories on their front pages. For example, today CNN featured an article titled "Possible 2012 GOP Candidates."
Political predicting is irrelevant. Need proof? A May 2007 article forecasting the 2008 election called Obama the #2 Democrat who would lose to Giuliani or McCain. The author went on to say, "No one knows it yet, but the real frontrunners are John Edwards and Mitt Romney." Enough said.
4) Celeb A feuding with Celeb B on Twitter
Twitter has its uses, like announcing sales and breaking news. If you want context, intelligence, question AND answers (Twitter can deliver 1, not both), go elsewhere. You want inane banter, sniping and speech without the PR filter? Go see who's twittin' what. But please, CNN, ABC, etc., leave these nit-twits where they belong, off the air.
2 comments:
nice observations. twitter must die.
I was at Southpoint the day the ipad 2 was released. The line for Apple was cray-zy. I didn't know what it was for. Then one of the million dads in line told me. I guess I've just never gotten why it'd be anyone's goal to get the first release of a product...of course it's going to have defects! That's why you wait a few months to see if anything better comes along.
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