“How do we decide what is newsworthy?”

We looked up at the professor, waiting for her to repeat the answers we had heard countless times before.

“There’s hard news, human interest stories, things that are bizarre…” she continued on. We glanced at each other, pretending to take notes but secretly scrolling through other homework on our laptops.

There are a plethora of factors that deem something “newsworthy.” Some are valid, significant, and important, while others are silly, unnecessary, and absurd. As a former journalism major and Managing Editor of a college newspaper, I’ve dealt with a wide spectrum of different news stories. Having to come up with article ideas for myself, approving pitches from other writers, and consistently publishing issues of the paper forced me to constantly ask that question: “How do we decide what is newsworthy?”

Today, and especially with the age of social media, we are constantly inundated with news. We sift through it, tapping and saving and liking and sharing, scrolling and clicking and reading. We consume beyond what our appetites can handle, and yet we crave more. We need to know anything and everything. We’re hungry for information, whether it’s about the latest Syria deal or the conflicts over the Nobel Prizes for literature or the joke Chris Pratt made about his wife’s cooking. From tales of civil war and protest around the world to vapid celebrity news across the coast, we engage, embrace, and devour the news.

But how much of it is actually newsworthy? How much of it actually matters? 

We rarely hear about the things that bear weight, the things that are real, raw, gritty, and gut-wrenching like the Rohingya refugees and their repatriation process. Instead, we get hundreds of headlines about who Miley Cyrus is dating now and what Kardashian said what thing and whether Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello are dating for real or for a publicity stunt. And these things are pushed and promoted and presented as important, substantial news stories that have to be read, seen, and heard in order to understand the world around us and walk through life as fully informed human beings. But what about Australia’s fight for press freedom? And the whole Brexit mess? And the violence in Iraq? 

It can be argued that there is too much negative news in the world. Too much heartbreak, too much strife, too many deaths and protests and wars and political arguments about things that don’t matter. So sometimes celebrity news is a welcomed change from the ruthless, merciless reality that persists, but there are still so many better things that could and should be considered newsworthy. 

And we are human. We err. We tend to swing too far in one direction. We can be extreme beings. Too often, we are entirely too cynical, skeptical, and jaded to the point of calloused, calculated coldness. We feed off a diet of catastrophe and crisis. We consume it like a sugary cereal, knowing it’s bad for us but not being able to stop.

Or we let the pendulum go too far in the other direction. We allow ourselves to be unfortunately uninformed, deluded, oblivious. We put ourselves in dangerous positions of naivety, optimistically trying to believe the world is a better place than it actually is, desperately trying to polish our rose-colored lenses until they gleam and sparkle. We ban all sugar from our plates and instead fill up on radishes and lettuce and things with no substance. Tougher things become hard to chew, harder to swallow, so we stick to what’s easy, what’s familiar, but what’s not entirely true.

We need to find a balance, an in-between. A meal that incorporates both vegetables and something sweet, healthy but occasionally indulgent. We need to teach ourselves how to be okay with having hope and havoc in the same world.

Buried beneath all the headlines about Taylor Swift’s feuds and Jennifer Lawrence’s wedding details are stories of humanity at their worst and trying their best. People who are fighting every day to survive, thrive, and make a change. Leaders who are corrupt. Laws that are being passed. Injustice that continues to rear its ugly head, growing like a weed and spreading like a wildfire. These things beg for our attention, our appreciation, our support. They beckon for us to take a closer look and see the issues for what they are and how we can help. They urge us to take action, to take ownership of our own faults and flaws and rise above the negative things we may contribute to the world. They inform and inspire. They give us a chance to become smarter, brighter, better, bolder. They open a door and invite us to walk through it. So let’s do it. Let’s read between the lines and take note of the implications and intimations. Let’s ask ourselves, “How do we decide what’s newsworthy?” and let’s focus a little more on what matters.