For the past ten weeks, WHAS 11 News has had the most fluff/celebrity/other stories on their news website. While they do a great job of keeping fluffy stories off of their broadcast news, it dominates their website. Amassing a total of 101 stories online over these ten weeks, it has the most stories online than any other of the stations observed. WAVE 3 News had a total of 32 stories, WLKY had 10 stories, WDRB had 23, and the Courier-Journal Online had 86 total celebrity/fluff stories.
This brings us to the yardstick of newsworthiness. While WHAS as a business wants to attract consumers, it must also follow the 9 principles and 7 yardsticks of journalism. The seventh principle, "make the important interesting, not the interesting important" also applies here. While WHAS as a business wants to attract consumers, it must also take care to balance what the public wants and what the public needs.
An example of a non-newsworthy story would be "Reality TV's new extreme: Being "Eaten Alive" by a giant anaconda snake." Credited to ABC News, the story appeared on WHAS's website, more like a blurb than an article.
Read it here: http://www.whas11.com/story/entertainment/television/2014/11/06/being-eaten-alive-anaconda-snake/18589743/
While certainly interesting, this story isn't necessarily important. It is not the job of the media to provide a look at what's new on the television. It violates the seventh principle as previously mentioned. So, WHAS, what's up with all the fluff?
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