Should news be interesting?

Of course, it should.

Here is a piece in the Atlantic that I find fairly suggestive. Basically, the author, Michael Hirschorn, took a sample of front pages over a period of time from the serious MSM and compared the editors' selections to the people's choices, as indicated by the articles that readers chose to e-mail.

The nut graf:
"What unites the most–e-mailed list (and granted, it’s hard to draw a single thread through stories about parrots, nuns, and Dumpster-diving foodies) is uniqueness. These stories, as they say in marketing, offer a “value add,” something that’s not available on the vaguely Soviet-seeming syndication-fed news pages of AOL, Yahoo, or Google. The real value now lies in non-commodifiable virtues like deep reporting, strong narrative, distinct point of view, and sharp analysis, which even in the blogger era (or especially in the blogger era) is available only piecemeal."

Turns out, editors of serious MSM newspapers are far more likely than their readers to highlight stories that dwell on depressing news, process stories about legislation, and "results" stories whose content reaches those interested constituencies much faster through some other means. And it turns out that the editors of MSM newspapers hide really cool, interesting stories all over the paper.


(I thought the Atlantic article, alas, could have been sharper: it should be tighter; it should state its point sooner and more forcefully; and it is crying out for a graphic presentation of the data.)