THE MAIN POINTS AGAIN

The latest trend in news services is to place increasing emphasis on the human interest story, we're told. Human interest is where the big bucks are, that is, apparently, what the audience wants. This is all considered a pretty new phenomenon.

What were the news people doing before the human interest edict? Surely, "human interest" is all news is? I don't recall any non-human interest stories among the six o'clock headlines. You know - "Cats discover new flavour of mouse", "Chimpanzees not worrying about inventing the combustion engine overmuch", "Bees come up with new dance called the buzz-tuzi", that sort of thing. It seems to me that the whole news agenda has been held together by the simple tenet of "human interest" throughout its life. In fact, the media as a whole is really all about the human interest. There just aren't that many dogs buying newspapers and plasma screen television sets.

If you're a reporter investigating a lot of stories that are of no human interest then, I'm sorry to break it to you, buddy, that ain't news. What you're working on there is the Ten O'clock Stuff.