Chris Henry, the Bengals wide receiver who can’t seem to stay out of trouble is back in the news. Yeah, what did he do this time? We’ll really nail him! He — get this — was ticketed for driving with expired license plates. That [redacted]. How dare he! Kick him out of the league right now!

A Cincinnati Bengals player who has frustrated his team with past traffic violations was back in court last week. Wide receiver Chris Henry was ticketed for driving with expired Kentucky license plates. He appeared in Hamilton County Municipal Court and paid $149, according to court records.

OK, we really have no sympathy for Henry, who has earned his reputation. But we also have noticed that he’s become one of “those guys” who will show up in the news if he merely sneezes. And too often these days, news is being defined as something that happened, rather than something that passes a certain standard based on something we in the business like to call “news judgment.” This Henry thing is probably worth a sentence at the bottom of a notebook in a Cincinnati newspaper; it is not worth a tease off the ESPN.com main page, which is where it was when we found it (it is not there anymore, though it is still the fourth item down on the NFL page). Did it make us click? Yeah, it made us click. But there’s a danger in burning on-line sports consumers too often with stories that go nowhere. Eventually, they won’t come back. That’s why we at least attempt, with every post, to gauge news and/or entertainment value. You might not always agree with the conclusion (see: Nazi sex scandal comments), but rest assured things aren’t just slapped on here because they happened.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.