Media Critique: I'd Tell You to Get to the Point but There isn't One

     I was looking through different news websites and found this article about smartphone shipments and couldn't resist the opportunity to write a media critique on the article.

Smartphone Shipments to Surpass One Billion for First Time By Jennifer Booton 

     I felt that this "news" article deserved a critique because it ignores both one yardstick of journalism and one basic principle, both having to do with the same main problem. That problem is:

     What is the point of this article?

     Exactly. There isn't one. It probably won't come as a surprise to you that this article was brought to you by Fox News.

     Anyway, one of the yardsticks of journalism, titled "Newsworthiness", makes it clear that any and all stories should have a "direct and lasting...informational impact on a wide audience". This just means that any article that you are thinking about writing should only take up your time and energy if it will actually affect a large amount of people over a long period of time. Otherwise, the so-called "news" is just pointless. This article just has a few random statistics that someone somewhere might possibly find vaguely interesting, but has no effect on anyone for any length of time, let alone six or more months.

     Related to that yardstick of journalism, this story completely ignores the basic principle of journalism that we know as "Make the Important Interesting". The main idea of this principle is to make important things seem interesting, rather than making interesting things that have no effect on anyone outside of the event seem important. This article clearly does the latter, making an interesting story into something more important than it is. There's still a problem in saying that, however, because this article is neither interesting, nor important. Nobody cares, and nobody needs to know this.

     Normally I wouldn't be this hard on (or sarcastic toward) an article, except for the fact that this absolutely irrelevant and pointless article was on the top of Fox News' United States front page.

     I kid you not. Was there anything in this article that was even remotely newsworthy, let alone enough for it to be one of the first things you see when you go to the U.S. news.

     I can't honestly say I'm surprised. After all, this is coming from the same organization that had this beauty:

Fox News: The most important news that is always relevant always and is definitely not pointless ever.

So it seems that the struggle against bad journalism continues.