You can always tell when it is a slow news day because you end up with headlines such as 'Dog Gets Head Stuck In Railings' or 'Squirrel Steals Knickers From Washing Line' because the rule is no matter what, no newspaper goes out with a blank page.
One paper in Canada decided to bend the rule slightly and went with the front page story that nothing was really happening.
'There isn’t really anything happening in the news this week' the Battlefords News-Optimist in Saskatchewan, Canada, told its readers, 'Not that it isn’t worth picking up the paper,” the lead
story continued, 'but, it’s January, the weather has taken a nasty turn and there just isn’t much happening'.
Very clever to make the lack of news a news story itself and the rule remains unbroken and everything in the Universe harmonises again but it’s not the first time an editor has made this decision.
On 18 April 1930, the BBC announced: 'There is no news today' and broadcasting ten minutes of piano music instead.
According to a computer algorithm the ultimate slow news day was 11 April 1954 which it has identified as the most boring day in history as there were absolutely no key news events or births and deaths of famous people.
Of course with all the social media and internet pages journalists have at our fingertips being unable to find a story is just lazy journalism because if you dig deep enough there's always a story out there and if not, just make something up about the weather and quote 'a source' but don't mention that your source was actually your Aunt Joan who said that it's going to be a wet summer because her budgie has been spending a lot of time at the bottom of it's cage recently.
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