By AUTUMN ROBERTSON

The other day, I was in line for coffee at Starbucks and I feel a buzz go off in my pocket. I glace at my phone to see a CNN push notification.

I get plenty of these alerts a day, but this one was slightly different than the others. The alert read “Two workers trapped on scaffolding dangling off new World Trade Center tower. Open your app to watch on CNN.” The Starbucks line was pretty lengthy that day, and it would have been a perfect opportunity for me to open up my CNN app to watch two men danging off the largest building in the United States. But at that moment, I felt too annoyed to even consider watching.

CNN’s popularity is based off of the news network’s ability to quickly access newsworthy stories and I applaud CNN for that. But, at times, it makes a spectacle out of news in order to get viewership. People love drama; that’s a fact. But the moment when CNN turns something scary and serious into a cash cow opportunity is when they lose me. I know that it is their job to give the viewers what they want, but that last sentence in the alert made CNN appear trashy to me instead of a company who delivers great news.

Maybe it’s just me, but I found that alert to be very harsh. I felt like CNN was saying “we have live footage and I know that you want to see if they survive or not!” Maybe I can’t fully blame CNN; viewers have probably asked for them to show more live footage of traumatizing events that they could easily open up on an application while waiting in line at a Starbucks, like I was. Is this the way news is progressing? I wouldn’t be surprised if I received more alerts similar to this one in the future.