There’s nothing new about silly stories getting a lot of attention, but the Internet has upended old news values that demanded you put war and the economy on the front page and relegate fluff to Page 18.

“There was a structural way newspapers kept all that stuff separated,” says Robert Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University. “The Internet totally annihilates that kind of structure.”

If all stories are created equal, in the sense of each having its own space on a Web page, then the ones that get linked to and clicked on the most might be those that are more amusing or titillating than informative.

Even aficionados of hard news may be more likely to share via social media a funny video of a beauty pageant contestant flubbing an answer than the latest developments in the Syrian civil war.