Silly Season - Motivation

Motivation

Typically, the latter half of the summer is slow in terms of newsworthy events. Newspapers as their primary means of income rely on advertisements, which rely on readers seeing them, but historically newspaper readership drops off during this time when, for instance, in the United Kingdom, Parliament takes its summer recess, so that parliamentary debates and Prime Minister's Questions, which generate much news coverage, do not happen. Similar recesses are typical of legislative bodies elsewhere, and there is also a decline of other news because vacations are common during that period. To retain (and attract) subscribers, newspapers would print attention-grabbing headlines and articles to boost sales, often to do with minor moral panics or child abductions. For example, the extensive British press coverage devoted to Operation Irma, a humanitarian airlift during the Siege of Sarajevo, was criticized as a "silly season" tactic.