Some folks at times complaint about the state of the media [View all]
and what they go into.
Many Americans have forgotten the difference between hard and soft news. So how do you tell Hard, soft and fluff apart?
Roughly,will it affect your life potentially (or for real) in a significant way? This is hard news.
Examples of hard news include laws passed by Congress, especially significant ones. USCS decisions, not all, but a few of them, your local City Council discussing how to attract business.
All these are rarely covered by news networks anymore. They require research, and they require staff. They are resource intensive.
Soft news are mostly things that have everybody talking (see Sterling right now) but in reality affect very few people. Yup, it affects Sterling, it affects his team, the PR is a nightmare, and a few things.
Now as far as Sterling is concerned, the hard part of the news is not the tape, but housing policies and him betting sued repeatedly. That is a part that is not being emphasized, see resources.
Other examples of soft news are really the if it bleeds it leads, which dominates local news.
Fluff, that is your forever home stories. Ok, have a few of those in the can for a very slow news day. They happen from time to time.
Some people argue that breaking news fall into the category of soft, and I actually put them in their own category. They can be important if it is something like a major wild fire, flooding situation, the storms right now in the middle of the country. But the every day crash, unless you are doing a story on drunk driving DUI, texting, is really soft news and very cheap to produce.
Foreign news can be in all three categories, A potential military conflict is pretty hard, but a crash, while spectacular, in somebody else's rail system is pretty soft, and mostly filler.
People, imho, have to become far better consumers of media. Personally I do not think that will ever happen, all complaints to the contrary.
And that matters to politics, since how news is produced can influence the political process, as well as how we view the world.
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