In this wonderful age of information overload, a lot of people now get their news through social media feeds, so only get to see the news stories that Facebook's faceless algorithms decide are worth seeing, or what their twitter-mates tell them to read and watch.
But there is still a place for the home page, and front page, and broadcasted bulletins, because that's where you find all the latest news, and it's got a bit of everything - local and global stories, and serious and silly yarns - and things you didn't even know you wanted.
News outlets are curators - distilling thousands of news stories that come down the wires, and from within their own newsroom, every day down to a few dozen, picking and choosing only the most interesting and most important, and putting them on their websites and pages and shows.
And just like a goddamn Jane Austen novel, position matters. There still needs to be a lead story. It's obviously the first story chronologically on a TV or radio bulletin, or the big-ass story on the top left of the newspaper or web page (because people in western cultures always start reading from the top left).
News audiences have been properly trained to know the lead story is the most important news of the day - no matter what, that's the thing they need to know from the day's events.
That's why the lead story should always be the most important. It's what matters, it's the biggest story around right now, and while there is room for a bit of trash in the mix, you don't lead on it, for fuck's sake, because then you're saying that the nonsense is more important than the worthy work.
Stuff muddy the waters nicely with their big fuckin' picture on the left of the page, which is the lead story when there is a big enough event (with a great photo), but is often a haven for the most obvious of click-bait, with the site insisting that the secondary story at the top of the actual main story list is the real lead. But nobody is ever buying that.
Those Bachelor stories that are soon coming our way are harmless fun, but harmless fun is never the biggest story of the day. It remains to be seen if the NZ Herald and Stuff will go crazy and give millions of dollars in free PR to Mediaworks this upcoming season by putting this drivel in their most precious digital real estate, but it's likely they will.
The problem is, those stories get just as many fucking clicks when they are three or four stories down (especially when that kind of story has traffic that is 90 percent driven by social). They don't need to be the lead to do well, and it just harms the brand, trashing hard-fought reputations that have been slowly built up over decades.
Just following the numbers, and the mad whims of the general public, to decide what goes in the lead spot gets us all nowhere fast. There have got to be some goddamn standards set, and the lead story shouldn't be easy trash. Position matters, it's important, and it's being pissed away.
- Steve Lombard
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