'Tragedy Porn' Drags Down News Sources

Online outlets mull pay models, putting a price on sensational stories
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 7, 2009 2:21 PM CDT
'Tragedy Porn' Drags Down News Sources
This undated image provided Thursday Sept. 3, 2009 by the Dugard family shows recently recovered kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard as a child.   (AP Photo/courtesy of Dugard family)

Word is that newspapers will soon start charging for online news—but no one’s quite sure what it’s worth. Take a story like the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping: It’s “tragedy porn” that “neither informs nor enlightens. It merely titillates,” writes Simon Dumenco for Advertising Age. “It's an extreme case, sure,” he notes, but infotainment seems to be a growing proportion of the news. Are we willing to pay for it?

“It's a deep irony that the we're-going-to-charge-for-news movement is being led, in part,” by Rupert Murdoch, who’s “done perhaps the most to pornify the news in the past few decades”  with “lurid and sensational” stories—not to mention the topless models in Murdoch's British papers, Dumenco writes. The bad news for Murdoch: the porn industry itself is struggling to compete with free alternatives.
(More news stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X