I’ve been an email subscriber to CNN’s Breaking News alerts for over a decade. In the beginning, it was sporadic and you might only get an email every couple weeks when some major disaster happened in the world. About five years ago it became once every few days, but still limited to major news events. Lately, it has become several emails per day. At this point, I can’t tell if CNN is really sharing large rare events or if they determined they could use this as a traffic source to their site to increase profits. Worse yet, instead of being limited to worldwide major events, the emails contain the results of reality shows, final scores in basketball games, or minor news about the US economy.
It’s become such a frequent email that it no longer feels like a rare alert system for tomorrow’s worldwide front page headlines, instead it feels like I’m following the most dramatic personal blog written by someone dealing with one daily tragedy after another.
A Whole Lotta Nothing 
I agree that CNN’s alerts have basically become rubbish these days. A little while ago, I switched over the NBC’s breaking news alerts, and those have been much more tempered. https://secure.nbcnews.com/_tps/_accounts/msnbc/smsinfo
But even NBC’s alerts are occasionally redundant or otherwise non-breaking. So if you come across some worthwhile alternatives, I’m all ears.
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I’m a long time subscriber to the NYT’s breaking news alerts, and I’ve noticed the same trend. I was going to say not quite as frequent as you show for CNN, but maybe it’s worse. In the last 48 hours, I have: OK Tornados, a JPMorgan shareholder vote, approval of the immigration bill by the Senate Judiciary Commitee, and Weiner running for mayor of NY. Ridiculous! I’m unsubscribing right now. The only one of those I care about is the tornados and I saw that on Twitter before I got the email.
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THIS. YES. And their little dog Twitter too.
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I turned off CNN a year ago and NYT a few weeks back. Completely liberating. If it’s important, you’ll hear about it.
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This is what happens when you fire all those expensive, doddering, old guard journalists and hire new media specialists and then, eventually, lowly paid interns.
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