Face it: cats have always had a place in news

Why BuzzFeed’s Exploding Watermelon Won’t Destroy Journalism

Next time you hear a journalist criticise an online-only outlet for its cat gifs, bear in mind that the New York Times got there first:

The paper documents a Timesian obsession to all things feline that makes BuzzFeed’s devotion to kitty videos seem restrained. With the exception of the 1950s and the 1960s—which another academic called a period of “high modernism” in which the Times dealt its readers mostly “accurate, ‘unbiased’ information about public affairs”—the paper has doted on cats over the past century.