When News Breaks

One of the most irritating feature of broadcast news operations these days is the overworking of the phrase BREAKING NEWS. It's used to cover virtually any story, from a major crisis to some celebrity's hangnail.

To get an idea how this plays with news consumers (besides me, as I tend to ignore most 24-hour broadcast news channels for precisely this reason), take a look at this column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online. I think the author gets it exactly right.

As for me, I think that if I were news director at one of these outlets, I'd probably try to promote the slogan, "When news breaks, we'll fix it!"  But then I suppose I wouldn't be news director for long...