Glory, fame and fortune can be tantalizing goals for today’s journalists. However, they can also act as negative influences, pulling reporters away from their original objective of telling the truth about what the public should know. In order to combat misplaced ambition, editors should replace it with passion for the news itself rather than money and awards.

Competition, whether over prizes or views, has worsened the quality of news coverage by many outlets. According to Emerson College professor and former CNN producer Janet Kolodzy, CNN drastically cut its bureaus to keep up with the competition. “I recall too many news meetings where The New York Times led the agenda,” she said. “Competition has led to copycat, lowest-common-denominator news.”

Competition also often leads to a complete lack of coverage on topics of reported interest to real audience members, as evidenced by a 2007 report by the Pew Research Center contrasting what news consumers considered important news with actual media coverage of those topics. Many large gaps were found between the two levels, but while most Americans think mainstream media overplays celebrity news, they still watch it; 61 percent said the media overplayed Smith's death, but 11 percent followed it as closely as the 2008 presidential campaign (13 percent) or Super Bowl (11 percent).

Though ratings and capital are not what news organizations should strive for, it’s still important to cover events people are interested and invested in. As per the Golden Mean, a compromise can be found by publishing related stories as long as they include newsworthy content relevant to the public. With this said, it is important to set high standards and regulations consistently for staff members to meet in these cases in order to avoid quality and credibility issues.

At a January 2004 conference at Annenberg titled “Reporting on Celebrities: The Ethics of News Coverage,” panelists listed questions journalists should ask themselves before writing on “fluff” topics: Why am I doing this story? Is there a journalistic reason for this story? What is the story's news value? How much time and resources are we spending on this? Is this being done at the expense of another, more important story?

To help ensure quality reporting, journalists should be passionate about what they report on. In order to emphasize the importance of the topic rather than the profession, editors should ensure that reporters are given beats they care about rather than what they would seem to write best about. Editors should look at the experiences of reporters and try to gauge directly from them what they are interested in so they can thrive and cultivate their skills, or let them choose for themselves.

Robert Niles, editor of USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review and former Los Angeles Times writer, assigned his students at Annenberg to publish a blog on a topic of their choice. “I felt it was important to allow the students to choose their beats to help them retain their interest as I swamped them with a lot of tech work that, experience has shown me, intimidates some students,” he had said. “If objectivity leads us to disconnect from our readers, our communities and our personal interests, it leaves us in danger of losing the passion that we need to remain in the field and to innovate.”

To even foster the possibility of attaining high ratings or a coveted journalism award, editors must encourage passion for news itself rather than the craft or the name while also stressing the importance of quality writing or broadcasting.