Read All About It

I'm not a journalist. Which is a good thing, because I'm not a particularly skilled writer. So I don't claim to have a deep understanding of the news business, and how it works. Especially when it comes to story placement. Generally speaking, I suppose that I expect that websites would be structured something like newspapers, with the most important stories at the top.

So I was somewhat surprised when I came across this version of NPR's website earlier today.

Were the accusations against a YouTube personality really the most important thing going on at the time? I'm not sure, for my part, that the story rated more highly than the announcement of layoffs at Alphabet/Google or (yet another) T-Mobile data breach. Or former President Trump and his legal team being fined for misuse of the courts. But then again, I'm not really in National Public Radio's target demographic. Millennials and "Generation Z," it seems, are.

And I can see why the story would be important to them; accusations against culturally relevant figures generally are. Even when they're new enough that it comes across more as youth-celebrity gossip, rather than verified wrongdoing.

As an aside, there was this throwaway line early in the piece: "But for many who follow Callaghan's work, the incident raises questions about Gen Z's tolerance for sexually questionable behavior." Outside of the fact that they never addressed the issue further, or included any opinion from the "many" in question, I found myself wondering just why "sexually questionable" behavior should be considered intolerable. After all, one would expect that the final decision on what to tolerate, or not, would depend in the answers to the questions raised.

But maybe I'm just an old man.

In any event, it's interesting to understand which markets that various segments of the news business are looking to serve. As much as people tend to posit that bias in the news media is about changing (if not outright controlling) people's "priors" and preconceptions, I think it's much more accurate to posit that people select the news they're going to take in based on what most closely aligns with those priors and those topics that they're interested in.

If the young, socially progressive audience that National Public Radio is pursuing finds the allegations against Andrew Callaghan are important enough to base their selection of news sources on who has the most information about them, then NPR will serve that up, and prominently.

And in that sense, they were the most important thing happening. Perhaps this is (and has been) why older people seem out of touch with the world around them. As people age out of the target demographics of the news sources they followed, they simply find the big stories of the day to be less relevant, and less worthy of spending time on. I know I'm starting to feel that way. I read the Andrew Callaghan story more out of curiosity with NPR's editorial decision-making than any actual interest in someone less than half my age seemingly getting into trouble for being persistent when pursuing sex. Perhaps that curiosity will be enough to keep me in the loop.