Two Friday notes

• There's been a debate among television news people about "breaking news" becoming irrelevant because it's being overused. You see this on Channel 12 here all the time. They flash the "breaking news" banner and follow it up with something lame or old. Now the Enquirer is getting into the act. This morning on the web site, under "Latest News" is this story about a Hamilton County jail worker being indicted for stealing toilet paper. This shows how desperate the Enquirer is to put up new things on its web site to improve traffic. Now, this is a curious bit of news, and there might actually be a better story here. Why indict the employee instead of just disciplining him? How much toilet paper did he steal? The Enquirer, however, gives us 80 words and four paragraphs, and just slaps it up on the web site without any attempt to answer even basic questions about it. If the Enquirer can't take the time to tell me a real story, please, don't bother me with this crap (no pun intended).
  
  
• The Enquirer has rolled out a "Speak Up!" feature on some stories, allowing users to add comments to stories. It's hard to tell which stories the Enquirer chooses to put this on. This morning I looked at 24 stories in Local, Business, Sports and Life, and found just 7 stories that had this feature, and only 4 had comments. The Enquirer should be happy to know that Yahoo is shutting down its message boards on news stories. "As they were set up, the Yahoo! News message boards allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion. In addition, related discussions from similar news articles were not easily linked," Yahoo says. Let's agree that Yahoo has a lot more experience at this than the Enquirer, and they're ending something the Enquirer thinks is a smart idea to start.