As I may have alluded to recently, the quality level of local news reporting continues to decline to levels of garbage quality. Press releases regurgitated with pleasure, on pages with so much advertising and autoplay videos on them so as to make them completely unreadable. I’m looking at you, Reach.
I took a random sample of the last 50 entries from the RSS feed from one of my local rags, specifically their dedicated news feed. Here’s what was present:
- Actual local news: 17 items
- Entertainment “news”: 10 items, mostly covering vacuous shite that happened on daytime TV
- Sales pitch masquerading as news: 7 items
- Obvious sales pitch making no effort to mask itself: 6 items
- National news: 4 items
- Listicle nonsense: 4 items
- Sports news: 1 item
- “News” of frivolous value: 1 item
A total content of 34% actual local news. Great.
For the hardcore amongst you, this is the actual unordered list of offending items:
- Actual local news
- Obvious Sales pitch – smartwatch
- Obvious Sales pitch – discount supermarkets
- Obvious Sales pitch – smartwatch
- Entertainment “news”
- Sports news
- Sales pitch masquerading as tech news – cars
- Sales pitch masquerading as entertainment news – streaming TV
- Entertainment “news”
- Actual local news
- Actual local news
- Actual local news
- National news
- Listicle nonsense
- Entertainment “news”
- Entertainment “news”
- Entertainment “news”
- Sales pitch masquerading as entertainment news – mobile game
- Entertainment “news”
- Listicle nonsense (with local slant)
- Listicle nonsense
- Actual local news
- National news
- Entertainment “news”
- Actual local news
- Actual local news
- Sales pitch masquerading as local news – funeral home
- Sales pitch masquerading as local news – training company
- Actual local news
- Actual local news
- Obvious Sales pitch – childrens book
- Actual local news
- Actual local news
- Actual local news
- National news
- Sales pitch masquerading as local news – event at conference hall
- Obvious Sales pitch – cars
- Entertainment “news”
- Actual local news
- Entertainment “news”
- Frivolous “news”
- Obvious Sales pitch – clothing store
- Actual local news
- Entertainment “news”
- Actual local news
- National news
- Actual local news
- Listicle nonsense (with local slant)
- Actual local news
- Sales pitch masquerading as local news – estate agency