Your morning aargh

I understand the pressures to fill those column inches, but is it really, really necessary for both my Saturday papers this week to have utterly identical, utterly tedious articles on Robbie Burns Day, Chinese New Year, and the Academy Award nominations? The first two I swear are just recycled from year to year; and there seems to be more and more bilge about the Oscars every year, even as normal people lose interest and the ratings drop. But then journalists are terrified of the responsibility of deciding for themselves what might be an important story. So if they covered Robbie Burns Day last year, and the Tourism Scotland p.r. office sends the same press release this year, they'll happily run the same damn story all over again, probably with a feeling of relief and satisfaction. And if the Oscars become boring, irrelevant, and uninteresting, if the televised show becomes unwatchable and people in fact stop watching, well, they'll just take it as fodder for a further genre of article moaning and whining about the Oscars. Whereas a rational person would respond by, you know, paying less attention to them.

I guess the truth is that at bottom the newspapers and the readers have radically different interests. As a reader, I want to learn important stuff I didn't know and read about things I haven't heard of before. (Pulau Weh, baby!) But new information is costly and time-consuming to acquire, and then there's the dread risk of controversy if you make your own editorial call about what's important. So a huge proportion of newspaper articles now are press release-driven, and/or a statement of the totally fucking obvious: weekend box office figures, stories about the Christmas shopping season, Oscar nominees, Robbie Burns Day blah blah blah. If there's one thing 'the news' should be it's unpredictable, but the papers are digging their own graves.