Important News?

Honestly, I never cared too much about which magazine can be seen as serious and which one not. But the other day I noticed that online magazines always seem to be the tabloid version of even serious magazines.

The same magazine…

…publishes an article on a study dealing with sperm allergy. BUT it is not a recent study, it’s a study that was done several years ago. What’s the point in publishing it now? I feel like they were just trying to catch my attention by using the well known idea of sex-sells. The title of the article is Sperm Allergy: Beware of Sex! Just to make every potential reader click on it. When reading you discover that only very few suffer from it. On the next page I found a serious article on Great Britain’s referendum on leaving the EU and I immediately thought: “Well, that’s important news!” However I found myself wondering:

What is important?

And who am I to judge? This very quickly leads to the question why and how news can be important at all and if so, can it be unimportant? What is the given standard for the definition of important? Who decided on this definition?

I always tend to say that everything that affects my life is important. At least to me. This would lead to the assumption that importance is subjective, but how can newspapers decide on individual importance? Is this why they publish a lot of things I consider completely unimportant? However the given article on the allergy can be considered anyways. Those affected by it probably know about the study since its initial publication and those who didn’t most likely do not severely suffer from this lack of knowledge. Does this lead to concluding that newspapers only serve their own purpose to be read and not mine to get informed?