Breaking News: Nick Bollea went to sleep in a room all alone.
Breaking News: Nick Bollea woke up and had nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
Breaking News: Nick Bollea used the restroom facilities.
Breaking News: Nick Bollea washed his hands.
Breaking News: Nick Bollea sat down and had nowhere to go, and nothing to do.
Breaking News: Nick Bollea tells parents that jail is not much fun.
Yeah, ok… I suppose there is room online for civic blight such as this. But in the printed newspaper? But does the same non-story – Jail A Shock for Bollea – belong on the front page of Metro?
Well, it might.
Take a look at TBO’s “most viewed” stories for Friday, May 23:
Articles most frequently viewed by TBO.com readers.
- In Jail Phone Exchange, Hogan Tells Weepy Son To ‘Man Up’
- Meteorologist Michaels Leaving WFLA, News Channel 8
- ‘Gas Phantom’ Reveals Identity
- Jail A Shock For Bollea
- Marijuana Grow House Busted In Temple Terrace, Deputies Say
- Bradenton Man Who Won $16 Million ‘Had To Quit’ Job
- ‘I’ll Never Get Over It,’ Man Says Of Finding Dead Baby In Trash Bin
- Deputy: Fleeing Man Pushes Baby Carriage Into Street
- Orlando Man Charged With Defrauding Tampa Airport Hotel
- 104 Potential Weapons Confiscated At Obama Rally
Yep – the #1 AND the #4 story are about Nick calling home from jail.
WP
1 year ago
And now it’s on the main page of Sticks too. I can’t get away from fluffy pseudo-news anywhere anymore.
Tam
1 year ago
I know it’s not really news worthy, but maybe America needs to see how selfish this young man is. He put his best friend in a near state of being brain dead due to his careless, irresponsible decision to drive like a maniac and he is complaining that is cell is half the size of his bathroom. Come on…what average american has a bathroom TWICE the size of a jail cell? Certainly not me and I live pretty good I think. He is a selfish, spoiled little coward and I hope he sits there and thinks of nothing but his friend who will never get the chance to sit anywhere and “think” about anything.
WP
1 year ago
One of the biggest reasons this young man is so selfish is precisely because America “needed” to see him and his family in the first place. If we’d all just stop watching the crap and giving two cents about the foibles of these fools, perhaps they wouldn’t feel so much more entitled than the average Joe. Celebrities, particularly the latest generations, are America’s royal class, their status not achieved by merit, but by mere happenstance of birth and luck. If you ask me it’s time for a good, old-fashioned beheading to set the scales to balance for awhile.
John F
1 year ago
This deserves no coverage. I don’t care if Nick Bollea is “selfish” to some or what not. Do you realize why he was prosecuted as heavily as he was? It’s because of his fathers fame and his own.
This would have been a passin, forgotten news story if there wasn’t celebrity involved. Now? The media doesn’t just want to relate the suffering – they want to cause more of it, humiliate him and the Bollea’s, etc
It’s pathetic.
Scott Gunsaullus
1 year ago
You have to remember that he was the subject of a reality tv show, whose ratings, however mediocre, probably attracted millions of unique viewers. If your were to disect TBO’s ratings by zipcode, I bet you would find that most of the readers are from outside the bay area.
Matt Neistein
1 year ago
Interesting how it’s the media’s fault that people clicked on those stories. It’s one thing to say the Big Bad Media overplays stories and you can’t get away from them … but maybe they’re overplayed because people – whether they admit it in front of others or keep it between them and their Maker – really DO want stuff like this. The media doesn’t force anyone to click those links; that’s a completely 100 percent independent decision made by the reader.
In which case, why is the media wrong for giving it to them?
Wake Up, Stupid Celebrity Culture!
1 year ago
Interesting how the media never wants to take responsibility for feeding the public’s appetite for celebrity-news crap. No two ways about it – the “monster” has grown because the media (including the “venerable” St. Pete Times and its trashy daily TBT) has largely given up its old role in favor of becoming the daily print version of celebrity TV/People mag.
And the papers wonder why longtime loyal readers are being driven off.
tommy
1 year ago
That’s my point, Matt… In this case, online readers have convinced Tribune to make this story the front page of Metro.
Read the link to Wayne’s post about civic blight – newspapers all over are trying to balance “important” with “entertaining” and the measuring stick keeps changing.
Wake Up, Stupid Celebrity Culture!
1 year ago
I’m not Matt, but my larger point is how newspapers continue to make such bad decisions, again and again, thus dooming themselves to extinction.
Their strategy (apparently): Overload the paper with celebrity crap, and the under-30s will come running.
The reality: The under-30s left long ago anyway (or at least abandoned print for the papers’ web sites), so the papers are reaching out to an audience that doesn’t exist.
AND (the double-whammy) by running all the celebrity crap they’re burning bridges with the age 40-plus readers who don’t want to see that s$%^&t in the paper.
This is called “newspaper management.”
Don’t these bozos realize that if they continue to remove the quality and quantity of content desired by longtime loyal readers, then that audience will shrink along with the page count? THEN who’s going to want to advertise?
Also – by “celebrity crap” I don’t mean legitimate arts coverage, one of the reasons that longtime newspaper readers have been loyal to print media. In their ultimate wisdom, idiotic newspaper manages have decided to steadily hack away at arts coverage. any day now, 100% of the coverage of film, music, television, theater, art and books will be generated by writers outside of the local community. That’s progress!
Wake Up, Stupid Celebrity Culture!
1 year ago
but of course, you weren’t responding to me. sorry.
Matt Neistein
1 year ago
I understand what the point is, folks, but think about what you’re asking. You want a news entity – for example, the Trib and all its associated branches – to deliver completely different sets of news to completely different groups of people in completely different ways, yet you want the Trib to do it with the same number of people on the same budget. It can’t possibly work that way.
If it takes me 100 reporters to put out the newspaper as it is – and that’s just a hypothetical, round figure – with all the new the 40-plussers wants, the “important” stuff, but now I have to populate a Web site with a completely different set of news for different people, all while maintaining the same budget, what do I do?
Well, I can split the group into two: 50 for print “important” news and 50 for online “entertainment” news, or any other proportions that add up to 100. That plan means the print edition suffers one way or another, and that won’t make print readers happy.
Or I can start assigning a mix of the two news types to my 100 people and populate both the paper and the site with both kinds of news and try to strike a balance. Again, that changes the newspaper, and print readers won’t like it.
At some point, print readers have to accept that it’s not 1980 anymore. Newspapers can’t just go out and double their workforces in order to create Web sites from thin air with different purposes and content than the paper. No business in the world can do that; Nike’s not going to keep selling running shoes on the East Coast and start selling waffle irons on the West Coast.
Most journalists aren’t happy with the changes and the evolution, either. But the fact remains that, in the paper or on a Web site, a story with the word “murder” in the headline gets read a whole hell of a lot more than one with “taxes.” That is a stone cold fact, and no one can blame that on papers. Humans are rubberneckers by nature, and I don’t think newspapers should have to apologize for appealing to that to some extent. They are businesses, after all.
You’re asking us not to give the customer what he/she wants in the name of doing what’s right for him/her. How many other businesses do you apply that standard to?
tommy
1 year ago
Matt, how many other businesses have a constitutional protection, and use it for larger and larger profits?
Matt Neistein
1 year ago
“Larger and larger profits”? Have you SEEN the Wall Street performances we’ve been putting up lately? The Times today announced layoffs and a wage freeze, and they’re a nonprofit!
As for being constitutionally protected, that and $1.25 will get you on the bus. Cold-blooded realism aside, yes, we journalists take our role in a free society very seriously. That being said, we still have to pay the rent, same as you, and our owners still need to pay their rent, same as you. There’s no way to get out from under the fact that is you have privately owned media, they need to make money. The only solution to that is to have publicly owned media, in which case we become Russia/Cuba/Iran/take your pick.
Understand, nobody in the media is any happier about the current evolution of the business than y’all are as readers. But there are certain realities we are beholden to, the same ones every other business is beholden to. So unless you’re willing to start paying $5 for a paper – which I highly doubt – or the economy miraculously turns around and advertising dollars come back, or the U.S. literacy rate jumps 25 percent and takes our circulation with it, newspapers are going to be tinkering with the formula and seeing what works. What Tommy’s post shows you is that “sensational news” works. We can argue which of us is the chicken and which is the egg, but that doesn’t change the fact that many more people read about Nick Bollea than they do the gongs-on of the Hillsborough County Commission.
Wake Up, Stupid Celebrity Culture!
1 year ago
I don’t need a print newspaper to find out what Nick Bollea or Debra LaFave or (insert your favorite famous-for-being-famous person here) are doing, because that pointless “news” is all over TV and radio and the Internet.
I DO need a local newspaper and its purportedly experienced staff (when you lop from the top, you lose experience, folks!) to be on hand at local governmental meetings, acting as a witness and voice for all the people who cannot make it to those meetings.
It may make for “boring” reading. But this is called representing the public trust, and if newspapers are going to give up on this aspect of their roles, then, you know, papers deserve to die.
I also need newspapers for informed analyses of local issues – news, arts, what have you.
But, you know, all of this trouble is rooted in the days, not long ago, shortly after newspapers enjoyed record margins of profit. Once those huge margins started to slip, publishers were “forced” to make decisions based on the short-term demands of the greedy bean counters.
Long term, some of those misguided decisions – slashing content, shrinking the news hole, getting rid of experienced reporters and editors – are resulting in a poorer product. When that happens, readers vanish, and, of course, so do advertisers. And the whole thing falls down.