The Fall of Serious News Coverage?

Serious News faces hard times

One of my current courses at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany deals with News Media and teaches me that serious news aren’t in demand anymore. Newspaper circulations decrease and TV stations rationalize news programs and political talk shows.

In short, one can get the impression that journalists have to justify their news coverage in times when social networks as facebook serve as a 24/7 news provider.

Nevertheless, there is a tendency that people in our modern society spend their time on light entertainment in preference to sober news. As David Croteau and William Hoynes state it in their publication on Media and Society in 2014:

“The most straightforward approach for audience maximization is to create a light, entertainment-oriented news product that makes watching or reading the news fun and exciting. This helps explain why so much of our daily news focuses on the lives of celebrities and on titillating or dramatic weather or crime stories.” (p. 60).

Is there hope for our society?

I took this common notion and compared it to my online statistics in medium. In total, I wrote four blog entries so far: Half of them deal with a serious topic; the other half consists of entertaining content. The first serious entry deals with Jan Böhmermann and has a ‘read ratio’ of 94% whereas the first nonsense entry dealing with the Topmodel series only has one of 76%. This trend reconfirms in the second comparison: the article on cats come to a read ratio of 54% while the one on security gaps reaches the total of 67%.

To put it in a nutshell, my online statistics has proved the contrary: People want to inform themselves about sad, hard and debatable topics!
(I know that those observations are unrepresentative, but, at least, I guess, there is hope for our society.)