one of the most disagreeable features of working in this trade is having to defend the excesses of colleagues. but maybe the overkill on such stories as heaven's gate would be mitigated somewhat if you knew what's going on inside those news organizations. herewith a short primer:
there are three basic rules for selecting news. maybe more, but these are the ones that come up day to day.
first is frequency of occurrence. the reason they're killing so many trees over the heaven's gate story is that stuff like this doesn't happen very often. so 39 dead trekies in a san diego mansion gets more coverage than the 30-odd traffic fatalities and homicides that no doubt occurred in california that day. likewise, the first day of the bosnian war, say, gets more coverage than the 1,136th day.
second is number of people affected. this accounts or the reams of dreary government coverage you get dumped on your driveway every morning. a 1-cent rise in the sales tax is a bigger story than a high school physics text selection controversy because comparatively few subscribers have kids in high school taking physics, whereas everybody pays sales tax.
third is whether the story entertains or informs. so we'll put a story about a dancing pig on page one if the writer does it properly. or a story about the current strain of flu going around, even though it may not be historically signifigant. also, daily outlets lead with what's most important that day. that's how hollywood gossip got to be a national staple: it gave editors a lead story back in the days when congress adjourned for the summer, and there wasn't much more of national interest going on.
all hard news stories have to answer key questions: who, what, when, where, how and why. the first five, in this case, got answered the first day. `why?' they're still working on. that accounts for `running the story into the ground.' as for the internet connection, a lot of people don't understand what it is, and ask questions whenever it comes up. they ask these questions directly, phoning up the city desk and demanding answers. and even though the reporter may know the answer (or not), he/she is barred from answering directly, but must contact authoritative sources and get their views on record.
the other point is that `the media' is an artificial construct. what you've got there is thousands of individual outlets, nodes if you will, backboned together by general interest outlets such as daily papers, weekly news magazines and broadcast news departments, with special interest journals branching off. each of these has made a separate deal with its subscribers. my paper has 300,000 in the western D/FW market. it doesn't matter that many of these same people are getting the same news from ABC or Newsweek. their deal is with my paper. what is sometimes called `pack journalism' often simply reflects the fact that people in different markets have the same interests and inquiries, and each outlet must satisfy that demand. (when you see special-interest outlets carping about how the mainstream media missed a story that's important to them, often the problem is that large numbers of people just don't care.)
some of it, of course, actually is pack journalism: you have a daily deadline an hour away, and about 30 seconds to pick an approach, and often you just have to do what everyone else is doing.
this is not to say that news organizations always do their jobs well. and a media storm can be tedious (i've covered natural disasters where the reporters outnumber the survivors and the sat trucks outnumber the remaining buildings.) and the charge that the monster has to be fed is true (we can't explain to our subscribers and advertisers that nothing important happened today, so we're not putting out a paper.) likewise the charge that reporters and editors can be airheads (you have no idea. truth is that the industry is huge and doesn't pay very well and is not attracting enough top people to replace the seasoned reporters and editors who are dropping out.)
so i understand your frustrations. since we're talking about a huge, influential and largely uncontrolled institution, i'd say they're healthy.
sorry to rattle on. warmest to all.
jlewis