I agree it's a terrible headline, but it's worth noting that it's not a story about "some problem."

A man, his wife, and their two little girls have been missing for over a week after getting lost in the Seattle snowstorm. It's getting a little bit more attention beacuse the man is a writer from a popular website.

Certainly not a gigantic story, but it's not a story about someone losing their pants, and I think it's interesting enough to merit some attention. It's a story about a missing family that most people thought was dead, but who were mostly found living in their car and burning tires for heat.
 

The guy is a senior editor at C|Net.com, a website I frequently visit.

He was wearing two sets of pants when he left, so just because they found one pair doesn't mean he's running around in his underwear:P

As for whether it deserves to be in the news? I'd hope that they'd put something in for me if my family and I got lost in a snowstorm.

Nowadays, getting truly "lost" in America is a very rare thing, hence newsworthy if it happens.
 

i guess it's kind of for the same reasons that fugitives have their faces transmitted all over the news when they go loose--so that people can recognize them.

there are limits though. given that it's pretty clear they were lost in the forest and not just hiding in some city, i don't see the benefit of continuing to publicize it, except to satisfy customers' wants. then again, i've always been opposed to corporate journalism and have always had a different idea of what "the press" should function like.
 

You have to have a heart to understand why this story appeals to people.

That's okay that you don't have one. Just keep on making us safe from the DC and the ASUC. That's very important too.
 

Oh, I'm sure it appeals to people. I guess it's just a matter of what you consider "news" to be. If reading the news is what you do to feel your warm fuzzies, have at it. I tend to opine that the news is where you go to find out what's going on in the world.
 

I haven't used the news to find out what's going on in the world since 2002. I think that's the year all major news corps decided to stop printing news, and start printing tabloid reject articles.

Yeah I know, not true in all cases, but I think you know what I mean:P Ever since the big media companies started demanding that their news departments be profitable, things have changed. In the old days of real tv journalism, it was pretty much expected that the news sectors of a company would be running in the red for most of the year. Now we get headlines like "Man's Lost Wedding Ring Found in Hay" (I pulled that off the nytimes website:P).

The rest of it is all Iraq stuff, and how stupid/stubborn our government is about said stuff. Which is pretty much overdone by now.
 

Well, Beetle -- a lot of people think differently than you. No big surprise.


SF Chron Headline: A FAMILY’S TRAGEDY
GRIPPING STORY: It was tracked by millions

I'm just surprised at your continued wonderment that the world doesn't work the way you expect it to.
 

I don't recall making a prediction about how the world would work. "I'm sure it appeals to people" may have seemed like a suggestion that I was expecting it to be popular, for the literate among us.

Of course, a news organization saying "Wow, this piece of news got a lot of attention" after presenting that piece of news in a manner designed to get a lot of attention is sort of silly.
 

"I tend to opine that the news is where you go to find out what's going on in the world."

cuz, yknow, this happened on mars. 'i tend to opine'. lol. do you wear a monocle when you blog?