News judgement 101

Since I work at dallasnews.com, I spend a very large amount of time on our website. It may as well be a job requirement, you know. Well, today I came across a story that seemed pretty standard, until the end. I question the reporter's journalistic ethics a bit in this one. It's a story about a high school student who was beaten and injured by 20 other high schoolers. Seems like the standard this-is-what-we-think-happened type of story until the end. This sentence throws me off as I read it: "Mr. Faram is a member of Woodrow's Variations choir and last year won a Napoleon Dynamite charity look-alike contest." Now tell me truthfully, does that really have anything to do with the fact that this kid got his ass kicked by 20 other kids? Is the guy trying to say that he's a good kid, or is he trying to say that he's a nerd and may have warranted a good ass-kicking? This doesn't add anything to the who, what, why, where, how context of this story. It doesn't help flesh it out, if you will. I think it just patronizes the poor kid. Why couldn't they say something else about him? I'm sure those aren't the only facts they could get about him. He's probably embarrassed enough that he had this happen to him, and they're going to throw that in as a kind of, "by the way..."? It's completely unnecessary to the context of the story, even if it is something that's common knowledge. Yet another reason why they need me writing for them instead of adding tags to HTML...