News Media Critique: WLKY

WLKY has decided to post and emphasize a child's church baptism where he is so excited, he baptizes himself. While this is definitely an interesting and funny story, it breaks several elements/yardsticks of journalism. 

For starters, WLKY has decided to post the story on the front page of their home/main page. When you go to their site, it is one of the first stories you will see. Not only do they have it on the front page of their website, it also is grouped together with news. All of the stories next to it would be considered newsworthy information, which is the next point.

This story breaks the Element of Journalism known as "Keeping the Important Interesting". It seems that WLKY has reversed this element and made the interesting important by emphasizing it on their front page. While other local news organizations have the story on their site as well, WLKY is the only ones that have it on their front page. The other local news stations have the story well tucked away into their populist sections.

This story also breaks a yardstick - "Newsworthiness". As I said, it is a very entertaining story, however, that does not mean that it is newsworthy. In fact, there were many other stories that held a lot more newsworthiness than this one did, and they were lower on the page/harder to find. They attempted to make this story news when it definitely was not.

In conclusion, WLKY should focus on newsworthy things and make those more important than entertaining things. While this was a nice minute of fame for the family, and even the church, it had little to no effect on anyone else and definitely shouldn't have taken the place of more important news articles.