I hear all the time from viewers who blast the media for focusing so much on bad news and never doing enough "good news" stories.  A former coworker of mine, Jan Harrison at 104.5 The Fox, wrote to me last week and explained it perfectly:

“News” is by definition that which is exceptional.  That is why abhorrent and sometimes horrible behavior is newsworthy.  It fascinates us because it is (thankfully) not what we experience everyday.  It also helps to avoid the abhorrent and horrible to some degree.  There are also stories like Mario Chalmers making an unlikely shot to send a game into overtime.  That is exceptional and thus it makes the news.

Thanks, Jan, for your always-wonderful insight.  I haven't had to call you lately about sentence structure, but I probably will need your expertise again someday!

So, for instance, stories about your kid making the honor roll or runaway teenagers aren't news.  If they were, it would mean that those topics were exceptional and out of the ordinary.  They simply are not.  In fact, I don't want to think about the day when it becomes so uncommon for kids to make the honor roll that it would be worth a news story when it happened.  That would mean we're in big trouble.