Are we giving our readers candy before dinner?

In the news businesses, you are always supposed to put the reader first. You need to present the news in an interesting and understandable way to grab their attention, and you need to try to give them stories that match their interests.

I believe it was for these reasons that the Argus Leader decided to run the story about a cat being put in a bong on its Nation and World Section despite having limited space.

I thought the Argus did a great job with story selection in that case because I know that I was interested in the case. The story talked about animal cruelty and a crime that happened in our region, and it was a weird story. These are all elements that interested me and probably interested a large number of people.

A friend, however, was not so pleased with the Argus's selection. She felt the story took up valuable space that could have been dedicated to other national and international issues. By selecting stories like the cat bong instead of current world issues, she said, papers are actually helping to dumb down the population.

Wait, dumb down the population. That is a serious charge.

She does have some good points. By putting that story in the paper as opposed to something like a Mexican prison riot, editors are calling the cat story more newsworthy. Once a culture is established that cat bong stories are more important than international prison riots than people will naturally read those "wild" stories instead of hard-hitting news. That could lead to an uninformed public that just wants strange stories. So in a way, journalists are responsible for giving people the news they might not find the most interesting but that is important to be informed about the world.

On the other hand, editors want to please readers. If they want to read about strange stories instead of hard news, who are we to say they can't. In the end, its actually the reader's paper, not just the editors or executives.

So I have to say that I'm officially torn on this issue. I think it's good to give readers a dose of weird news every once and a while, but then again, I don't want newspapers or other serious news outlets to become totally devoted to just offbeat news. I think newspapers need to find a balance, and in this case, I think that's exactly what the Argus was trying to do.