When I log onto the internet and go to my home page (iGoogle), there are a few news sources that show me important news. Which is really what you want from a news site. One of the sites whose headlines pop up for me is CNN, and every day, sometimes several times a day, there’s a yellow box that says “BREAKING NEWS.” Then inside the yellow box, there’s some important piece of information which the CNN people feel is earth-shaking enough to put into a yellow box.

Sometimes it’s literally earth-shaking, like an earthquake somewhere in the world. That seems yellow-box worthy. Sometimes it’s related to the presidential election, like last week when Santorum dropped out of the race. Although not exactly “news” to most people, since he wasn’t even close to succeeding, the fact that he finally figured that out was “news” I guess, in a way.

Then a couple of days ago, there was another special yellow breaking news item – Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are now engaged. Go back and read that last sentence again, and ask yourself, “Is this really a yellow box kind of thing?” Did you do that? It’s OK, I’ll wait…

I think there should be different colors for “breaking news” items. Yellow for things that are actually crucial, like a big earthquake or a bunch of tornadoes. Maybe green for things like “we saw this coming a few months ago, but it’s good that Santorum has finally realized it.” 

And maybe purple or pink for things like “Brad and Angelina… who are they again? Oh yeah… hey, I thought they were already married… and we care about this because…???”