The news lies in what clicks

CLICKBAIT: Kim Kardashian and husband Kanye West.PHOTO/AP

MUCH has been made of the dumbing down of prime time in the wake of Campbell Live being replaced by Road Cops and now - not much better - another ubiquitous cooking show.

Word on the street is that TV has gone soft.

But that's all good because TV is about entertainment, and we have that bastion of the fourth estate, the newspaper, for those of us still wanting to be informed, right?

That may be so if you are among the admirable, intellectual, time-rich minority that still walks to the letterbox each morning in slippers to retrieve the newspaper and languidly enjoy it over a hot cup of tea.

But in a world where technology and "progress" has allowed us each to do the work of 10 men, it takes two incomes to pay the mortgage and the kids need to be dropped at school because walking isn't safe anymore, who these days has their feet up reading the paper?

What many of us do have time for is a quick scan of the online edition of our favourite paper, and perhaps the chance to select two or three stories to read while standing at the kitchen bench eating toast.

The trouble with this is that in the same way we know we should be eating low-fat cereal instead of the toast, we should be reading the serious news about interest rate cuts and third-world poverty instead of what Art and Matilda did on the weekend.

Just as we'll never know if the chicken or the egg came first, we can't really say if news got dumbed down because we as consumers started reading the fluff stories first, or those stories got dished up to us because newsmakers predicted our appetite for dessert before dinner.

What we can say is that "news" as we once knew it has taken a hit, and not just on the telly.

Today on a leading online edition (in the interests of my ongoing employment it was not one owned by NZME.) I scanned the home page and prominent among it I found the following: a story about an alleged knicker thief being caught, a tell-all about the dangers of wet wipes, the arrest of a British tourist for stripping naked on a mountain a very long way away from us, Homer's imminent divorce from Marge and - topping the most popular list - an item about a rogue poo closing down the Wellington tunnel.

A thumbnail picture pointed to a story about Kim Kardashian's pregnancy (because we can't go a day without getting an update on that, of course).

In defence of the website, there were more traditional headlines dedicated to weather emergencies, fiscal announcements and fatal crashes.

But none of these stories featured on the "most popular" list or among the editors' picks. Which begs the question: who the hell is reading them?

The harsh truth is that all of us (me included because I read the wet wipes story right to the end) really care that much about being informed on the big issues of the world today.

In a very short space of time since the introduction of technology that allows us to pick the "news" that interests us and ignore the rest, the entire landscape of information delivery has changed in direct response to demand.

We can't blame the editors and writers. We can only blame ourselves for clicking on the Kim K story over and over again.

Supply follows demand and sadly and perhaps dangerously, our demand seems to be for entertainment ahead of information.

Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.