What classifies as real news?

Is it really such a big deal that a councilor for the city expensed his taxi rides?  And is it also earth shattering that another member on that council decided to expense a chimpmunk costume?  The only thing that may intice me read more, is if it was the same councilor was in a chipmunk costume taking a cab..
In a tech savvy world that we have become, formerly referred to as "irrelevant" information, now seems to take centre stage.  Cell phones capturing images of what one deems irresponsible, others tweeting about how annoyed they are with waiting for the streetcar.  What happened to relevant news? 

When scouring the Web daily searching for "real" stories about Toronto,  looking past the clouds of tattle tale stories, one starts to wonder where the line blurs between real news and stuff that just sounds good in the news.  There are so many interesting things to learn and understand out there, things that people wait for in anticipation hoping to- jump the line so to speak on issues that in passing may not seem relevant, but if they touch us in any way, or if it relates to us, it then becomes interesting.  Like a filter, I assume and expect that reputable newspapers and news programs would only gather information, and present it to an audience, that would be classified as having some sort of standard, for not only what news they would expect, but what news people in the industry should deliver.  Adding to this frustration is the fact that the stories which involve these people taking cabs and expensing chipmunk costumes feel they need to explain why they did make these poor judgement errors in the first place, which now makes it somewhat relevant to us as tax payers.  The bigger issue in these two stories is the amount of which councilors are allowed to expense and at what reason...?
I don't care that the chair of the TTC took a cab down the street from city hall, or racked up $3000 in cab expenses.  I have seen Adam on the subway and cannot remember seeing any other member of council on public transit (not to say that they don't take it), but just how much are they allowed to expense in travel costs, and costume rentals in a year?
Now when a councilor has to repeatedly apologize to the citizens through that very media that exposed his indiscretions from sleeping with the teenager to expensing the cab rides to meet her time and time again, one would think that was a subtle way of fate telling you to let go and move on.  In the grand scheme of things, all those little news worthy headlines which seemed irrelevant at the time, now seem somewhat interesting and infuriating after watching the repeated mistakes ranging from wrong to just stupid.  I look forward to reading the daily headlines, and I now anticipate the ridiculous ones as well, I take them with a grain of salt, but now have to wonder what relevance it will have in the bigger picture down the road... so now I read them.