Cyber Communication & Journalism (Lec-05) What is News? The criteria that professional reporters and editors use to decide what news ...
Cyber Communication & Journalism (Lec-05)
What is News?
The criteria that professional reporters and editors use to decide what news is can be summarized in three words:
1. Relevance
2. Usefulness
3. Interest
Relevance, usefulness and interest for a specific audience are the broad guidelines for judging the news value of any event, issue or personality. These criteria apply generally, but each journalist and each news organization uses them in a specific context that gives them particular meaning.
That context is supplied by the audience—the reader, listener or viewer. Journalists always determine newsworthiness with a particular audience in mind.
Elements of a Good News Story Within the broad news standards of relevance, usefulness and interest, journalists look for more specific elements in each potential story.
The most important elements are these:
1.Impact-
The potential impact of a story is another way of measuring its relevance and usefulness. How many people are affected by an event or idea? How seriously does it affect them? The wider and heavier the impact, the better the story.
Sometimes, of course, impact isn’t immediately obvious. Sometimes it isn’t very exciting. The challenge for good journalism is making such dull but important stories lively and interesting. That may require relying on the next three elements.
2.Conflict-
Conflict is a recurring theme in all storytelling, whether the stories told are journalism, literature or drama. Struggles between people, among nations or with natural forces make fascinating reading and viewing. Conflict is such a basic element of life that journalists must resist the temptation to overdramatize or oversimplify it.
3. Novelty-
Novelty is another element common to journalism and other kinds of stories. People or events may be interesting and therefore newsworthy just because they are unusual or bizarre.
4.Prominence.
Names make news. The bigger the name, the bigger the news. Ordinary people have always been intrigued by the doings of the rich and famous. Both prominence and novelty can be, and often are, exaggerated to produce “news” that lacks real relevance and usefulness.
5. Proximity-
Generally, people are more interested in and concerned about what happens close to home. When they read or listen to national or international news, they often want to know how it relates to their own community. Some news organizations are turning to hyperlocal coverage as they seek to reconnect with readers; they report at the neighborhood level, sometimes by soliciting contributions from residents or citizen journalists.
Independent websites devoted to this kind of extremely local coverage are springing up across the country. Increasingly, however, journalists and scholars are recognizing that communities organized around a particular interest—a sport, a hobby or an issue—are at least as important as geographic communities.
6.Timeliness-
News is supposed to be new. With the Internet and cable and satellite television, “new” means instantaneous. Events are reported as they happen, and this poses a challenge for journalists. Speed conflicts with thoughtfulness and thoroughness. Opportunities for error multiply. Perspective and context are needed today more than ever, but both are more difficult to supply with little time for thinking.
Despite the drawbacks of 24/7 news coverage, it’s clear that for news to be relevant and useful, it must be timely. For example, it is much more useful to write about an issue facing the city council before the issue is decided than afterward. Timely reporting can give people a chance to be participants in public affairs rather than remain mere spectators.
The digital age, with its often-confusing multitude of sources, splintering of audiences and growing complaints about negative news, has inspired most journalists to add two new criteria for assessing the value of stories:
7.Engagement-
When news was only broadcast or printed on paper, the flow of information was one-way—from journalists to audiences. No more. Today, a news report is often just the beginning of the conversation. Audience members online respond to, correct and criticize the journalism.
Many reporters and commentators maintain blogs and invite responses on social networking media such as Twitter and Facebook to encourage such involvement. Increasingly, a goal of both individual journalists and news organizations is to engage the public with the news and with the news provider.
8.Solutions-
Scholars and audiences alike complain that journalists too often report problems and controversies without offering solutions. Political scientist Thomas Patterson has even argued that the negative tone of much coverage of politics and government has the effect of increasing cynicism and decreasing What News Is 7 participation in the most basic activities of citizenship, such as voting.
More and more journalists are seeking out expert sources and inviting audience members not only to explain complex problems but also to suggest solutions.
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