The following may lead to a price being put on my head by the staff at The State Hornet, but I am going to tell you why I love the tabloids. To put it in a word: sass. The tabloids got tons of sass. They have nothing but sass.

Many feel they have too much sass. OK, so 90 percent of the stuff they write is made up and they make the lives of a number of celebrities a living hell.

But let?s not be so negative. The tabloids are great because they are not self-diluted. The only thing they are looking to do is to entertain their readers. They don?t present themselves as serious reporters and then go out and do fluff pieces that have absolutely no substance to them. And yes, Barbara Walters, I am looking in your direction.

The public has a negative opinion of the tabloids because they employ the dreaded paparazzi. Those who are the guys with the cameras who stand outside the apartments of famous people and chase them around snapping pictures of them looking horrible. Of course there really is no difference between this and the press corps who follow around politicians and heads of state, firing questions and jamming video cameras into their faces.However, mainstream print media can feel good about themselves because they are not about entertainment, they are about informing the public. It isn?t like most newspapers are scrambling to follow USA Today with bright graphs, smaller stories, and a heavy emphasis on feature stories. Just look at the new Sacramento Bee and how it has a bunch of vivid colors, not to mention smaller stories.

At the heart of the intense hatred of the tabloids is how they take a nugget of truth and run with it. How the tabloids can make entire stories based on something they heard from some guy, somewhere. Once again, if you believe the mainstream media doesn?t do this, I have two words for you: Ricard Jewel! Or Fox News and Geraldo Rivera pulling news stories out of their butts.So why are tabloids successful if every issue produced is nothing but horse poo from cover to cover? Because they write about people. People like to read about other people, hence People Magazine. Journalists are trained to make their stories more personal so that the readers will be more interested in what they are reading.

This is why the tabloids had two great victories in the 90s. The two biggest stories during this time were O.J. Simpson and the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. Something that the mainstream media will never be able to live down is that the tabloids were the leaders in covering these two stories. Indeed the best information about the trial of the century and the most famous White House affair could be found sitting in wire racks in the checkout stands in grocery store across America. Once again, this left the mainstream media scrambling to play catch up.For a publication of television program to stay afloat, it needs people to read and watch it. These media depend on advertising and the people placing the ads want to know that the ads are actually being seen.

It is common nowadays to say that news is all style and no substance, and many news outlets may be guilty of doing so. The rest have just wised up and followed the way of the tabloids. News media now realize the fact that they have to compete against pure entertainment for viewers and readers. Why watch PBS when you can watch porn? Why read a newspaper when you can play a videogame? Basically, why read something that is boring when you could read something that is fun?

Slowly news outlets are realizing that news now has to be treated the way that you give a dog medication. You can?t just jam the pill down the dog?s throat, you have to wrap it in a piece of bologna first. News media now need to give the news a little style so that we take our medicine and stay informed. The profession of journalists is a noble one, but take a little starch out of the collar and make the stories fun for the readers. Who, what, why, where, when and how are dead. If you give the readers something they want to read, then they will read.

E-mail Ryan Flatley quickly, while he is still employed, at [email protected].