What Is News?

By Author: White
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Just what is news? Despite many efforts, no neat, satisfactory answer to that question has been found. Some deaths are news; many more are not. Some strikes draw head-lines; others are ignored. Some protests become lead stories; others go unnoticed; still others are deliberately disregarded. The best answer seems to be that news is what re-porters, editors, and producers decide is news.

That answer contradicts traditional notions that news is "out there," that reporters "just cover the story," that news is "what's happening." Instead, that answer says that news is selected, even created, by news people. It Omega Replica(http://www.watcopy.com/B-Omega-30.html) claims that news is not just "the facts," but also rhetoric—messages influencing how readers and viewers perceive reality. It would be surprising if this were not the case.

News is gathered, written, edited, produced, and disseminated by human beings who are members of organizations and who have beliefs and values. Organizations such as networks have functions and goals as well as relationships to government, to regulatory agencies, to advertisers, ...
... to their parent companies, and to the vast audiences they seek to attract. These beliefs, values, functions, and interests are bound to influence the messages these networks publish and broadcast.

On a more complex level, this answer suggests that news gatherers and news organizations are persuaders who shape our views of reality, who induce us to believe one thing rather than another. We examine this controversial argument in the next chapter. Here, however, we treat the simpler claim. We examine the concept of "hard news" or "spot news" (everyone concedes that "soft news," such as feature stories, is not objective) in order to set up a model of the news story. We explore the criteria governing what news people define as news, the constraints influencing what actually will be covered, and the conventions controlling how a news event will be presented.

We begin by identifying the norms that Omega Speedmaster Replica Watches(http://www.fashion-replica.com/GoodsSeries/Speedmaster-297.html) define what is newsworthy. Then we discuss the external and internal factors that influence what is actually covered and reported. Finally, we describe considerations that affect how the news is presented.