News: The weirder, the better

Journalism, in a nutshell, is storytelling, and we use facts and sources to help tell those stories. Lucky for us (and you), not every story is about politics, hard crime or sports — sometimes it’s just about weird stuff.

We live in what I like to call the Golden Age of Weird. Thanks to the Internet, we’re but a couple clicks away from truly engaging and thought-provoking stories.

Just last month, Oklahoma saw something truly weird: A man might have spontaneously combusted in Sequoyah County. Let me rephrase that: An Oklahoma man might have just all of a sudden burst into flames — from the inside.

Where are you when we need you?!

And now, some paranormal investigators are studying the case.

Why? Because it’s weird.

Sometimes the story isn’t so much about the “what” as it is about the “how.” That’s what makes the aforementioned story worth telling, and why people clicked on it like crazy when they saw the headline on NewsOK.

It’s not that Oklahomans have a sweet tooth for all things oddball, like we’re some oddballs ourselves for reading, sharing and talking about such things. We’re just humans, and that’s weird enough.

It’s in our nature to seek out what we don’t fully understand. It’s why people hunt ghosts, or Bigfoot.

Suuuuuuure.

It’s why people would rather click on a headline that reads “Oklahoma man dies from apparent spontaneous human combustion” than one that reads “Man’s death investigated in Sequoyah County.”