January 25, 2008 at 12:01 am
· Filed under Media Industry
The death of Heath Ledger is a boon to newspaper circulation. People who normally don’t buy a daily paper are picking up dailies to catch up on the latest details. August publications like The Melbourne Age dedicated three full pages yesterday. Today The Sydney Morning Herald still has a page. The weekend tomes will be filled to capacity.
It’s all our fault. We’re ghoulish. Bad news intrigues us. But add an Australian celebrity, drugs, nudity and an Olsen twin and you’ve got a newspaper editor’s nirvana.
Please don’t presume I am mocking the untimely death of Heath Ledger. It is a shock and disappointment. He was a talented actor and his death is unfortunate.
It’s just this stuff sells papers.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Permalink
Edmund wrote @ January 28th, 2008 at 12:36 am
With all that’s happening in the world, an Olsen twin’s involvement in the untimely death of Heath Ledger is big news?
It seems that with “old skool” journalism on life support — thanks mostly to unopposed corporate consolidation — anything that will compete with instantaneous mash-up of information available online is now what’s labeled “news”.
Unchecked, systematic desensitization of consumers — and I use that word deliberately, since there is no real audience to speak of anymore, just people who consume the carefully-packaged product called news — by extremely competitive media outlets can only result in taking new lows to greater heights.
And it’s all about the Benjamins.
One thing to consider: if this is what sells papers, what does it reveal about the readers’ lives?
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Thanks for visiting!
