It is widely accepted that the worlds of web journalism and print journalism are very different places indeed. While the Fleet Street Brigade normally get their hands on the big controversial stories first, the web journalists tend to be much quicker at reporting on trending articles and are the authority on all things internet, technology news and the weird, wacky and wonderful.

However it is still difficult to imagine that a newspaper could be so far behind the times that they are only just running an article about something that the rest of us see as really really old news.

Yesterday Uproxx.com’s Cajun Boy pointed out that Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper very recently ran an article about the Internets cat obsession. I mean seriously, who doesn’t already know that? The article was called ‘Wacky cat pics are web hit’ and talked about the ‘lolcats’ section of Eric Nakagawa’s Icanhascheezburger website.

The articles focus was the fact that the website is a success and that people love to look at pictures of cats doing crazy things on the internet. There was no new angle to it or anything that the majority of us weren’t already aware of. They featured a number of popular cat pictures in the article, some of which have been around the internet more times than Usain Bolt has been round a race-track!

Cajun Boy said: “Is it any coincidence that a British parliamentary committee ruled today that Murdoch is unfit to run a media company? I think not.” I think it would be fairly difficult to disagree with him on this one.

When I used to write for a weekly local newspaper, my editor was constantly banging on to me about knowing the importance of what is ‘newsworthy’ and what isn’t, he trashed so many of my story ideas because he felt that they weren’t recent or newsworthy enough. I know exactly what he would have done with that story…

Here’s that article about LOLCats in the Sun.

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