In the Media: People prefer to read the bad news, which, yes, shocking, right?

The past 36 hours have been a sober reminder that the old journalism axiom “if it bleeds, it leads” is unfortunately entirely accurate.

Our latest case in point to that effect is the horrible, awful news of the shooting deaths of three UVA Football players that was thrust into the news cycle for us locally yesterday.

Our staff has, to this point, put together a package of 11 stories and columns covering the developments in the breaking news, memorializing the victims, contextualizing the community grieving, providing information for people who are struggling with trying to process what happened, with one story offering insight into the life of the shooter.

You’d want to assume that the stories memorializing the victims, the community grieving and the impact on our collective mental health would top the analytics.

Of course, that’s not the case, not even close.

The top two stories over the past 36 hours are the lead story with details on what happened, in essence, the lead crime story, and the story offering insight into the life of the shooter, basically, the second crime story.

Those two stories have accounted for 71.2 percent of the traffic on our 11-story package of stories to this point.

And of course there was other news to report on yesterday, and so you probably won’t be surprised to learn that fourth other police beat stories – one on a missing teen from Portsmouth, the second on the death of a missing teen from Lunenburg County being investigated as a homicide, the third on a missing teen from Gretna, the fourth on a fatal car accident in Albemarle County – have drawn 1.5 times the number of clicks as the memorial, community grieving and mental-health pieces from the UVA shooting package.

I don’t like this any more than any of you do.

We put a lot of time and resources into things like the memorial, community grieving and mental-health pieces on the UVA shooting, writing about how the local homeless shelter needs $40,000 in community support to get through the winter, and the local City Council race in which a MAGA, election-denying challenger was in a too-close-to-call race with a family medical practice doctor incumbent.

There was a story that we dove into over the summer chronicling the efforts of a non-profit to aid local victims of interstate sex-trafficking rings.

Our staff does great work on those stories.

Those stories get a tiny fraction of the “if it bleeds, it leads” stories.

We can pretend we don’t know what’s going on here, but we all know.

It’s human nature.

We rubberneck at fender-benders, gossip across the fence about whatever salacious thing is going on in the neighborhood that week.

And then when we open the paper – do they still actually print the paper? edit: when you click on the news on social media – we complain haughtily that the only thing in the news today is bad news.

There’s actually a lot of news for you to consume that isn’t bad news; you’re just not clicking on it.