10 Signs Your News Source is Mailing It In

In some places they’re called “evergreens,” those stories you see year after year: Last day of school, reminders to check your tire pressure, the annual pardon of the White House turkey (this year the turkey was the one on the right).
Reporters hate them. They do them only because editors tell them to. Since most editors were reporters until they got out of journalism to chase the money, I’ve often wondered when the change takes place. At what point in the slog up the ladder does a lively writer start believing readers need to be reminded that when temperatures dive, they should wear jackets?
Christmas is the high season for stuff like this, because there’s not much real news and half the staff is using up the vacation they couldn’t get approved in July. At some newspaper or TV station right now—hell, at hundreds of them—an editor is telling a reporter to see whether the stores are full of people doing last-minute shopping. On Wednesday morning, the same editors (or their holiday fill-ins; no difference) will want an analysis of whether shoppers are taking advantage of post-holiday sales.
Watching for these things, it turns out, is a quick way to tell if your news source is doing its job. When updates on Britney Spears or late-breaking flashes on the biggest-grossing movie of the weekend outnumber stories containing actual pertinent facts, it’s a clue: Look elsewhere for the information you need, say, to make an informed political choice.
With an eye toward helping you make these determinations, here are 10 Signs Your News Source is Mailing It In:

1. It contains more than one mention per week or one picture per month of Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears or anyone in their families in any context not involving a crime sufficiently heinous to be mentioned if it were committed by a manicurist from West LA.
2. Any headline or major story begins with the words “Gas prices . . .”If you have to be told what gas prices are doing, they aren’t affecting you. If whatever they’re doing is affecting you, you already know. Gas price stories are classic space-fillers, the kind of thing some editor is sure to bring up in every meeting because he can’t think of anything else.
3. It documents crowds in places that normally draw crowds. A throng at the mall on Dec. 26 is not news.
4. At the end of a holiday weekend, it tells you the roads were crowded. This is particularly lame in newspapers, where the best they can do is let you know on Monday morning that if you came home Sunday night, you probably got stuck in traffic.
5. It contains any reference to how you should dress or where you should set your thermostat for a given set of weather conditions. Television is reliably idiotic about this: “It’s going to be in the teens tonight, so you’ll want to crank up the furnace.” Whew, saved me from turning on the air conditioner five months early.
6. It warns you to slow down in bad weather. Sure, it’s good advice. But anyone dumb enough to need a reminder is too dumb to heed it.
7. It says, “Store valuable items out of sight and lock your car.” You know all those times you left the Macy’s bags on the hood just for a minute while you ran into Starbucks? Well, now you know not to do that.
8. It passes along as God’s revealed Truth the contents of any White House report released on a Friday afternoon.
9. The term “white Christmas” appears after Dec. 20.
10. It gives you one more goddamn story about parents “frantic” because they can’t find a Wii. Granting that you want to do what you can for your kids, teaching them that everything isn't instantly available is not a bad lesson. Buy them a book, then read it to them.