My Local Online Newspaper

NorthCountryNow.com .....I'm not blind....I realize that all media is corrupt.  All modern media heels to the sources of their own funding.  If a media source needs to increase viewers or readers to increase profits then that is what they do, by whatever means necessary.  I believe that this is true from CNN all the way down to this small local media outlet.  It's a shame, though.  You'd like to think that maybe on a smaller, more local level, you might not see the greed, you might see something a bit more like what we used to call news.

Not that North Country Now ever posted anything remotely similar to news or current events, heck, Topix has more accurate current event information, but I've deleted them from my list of sites that I visit.  They've held the kind of entertainment value that used to be found with papers like The Weekly World News, and the Nat'l Enquirer.  Most recently, though, they've gone so far as to foster and promote a letter writing war among their readers.  They started by posting one woman's letter in the main news feed, which they sometimes do.  They made sure to pick the most inflammatory letter they could, which was of a woman condemning Potsdam's Gay Pride parade.  (A small town's first parade of this nature, and a first in our county, and it was lovely!)   In the following weeks, there have been flurries of letters written back and forth among readers and posted to their pages and the managers of the site keep the drama going by picking and posting alternating view points to the main news feed.  So essentially what North Country Now is telling us is that the North Country is so weak that ignorant debates over the sinful nature of humanity as deemed by "Good Christians" versus equal rights and our personal freedom not to have to listen to the condemnations of sheep is not only newsworthy, but what we deserve to read.  They're trying to increase site hits by increasing public drama rather than by seeking out and reporting news.  They weren't exactly a great news source, but they did report a lot of the smaller and more personal stories and I liked that.  Now they've just sunk to a new level, though.

Whatever mine or anybody else's opinions are about equal rights and such things, an alleged news source should at least not promote drama and bickering amongst it's readers in order to promote readership.  That isn't reporting the news....that's trying to make something into news, that's just ignorant drama.