What Is News

It is usually said, no news is good news. However, for all the journalists, no news is bad news.

With the increasing appetite if audience and drastic competition, journalists can’t avoid the problem that, how can we find more good news to satisfy the audiences, to attract their attention, to feed our broadcasting system. However, the world is not made of news. When lacking of news, some journalists will made up false news, or to sensationalize the news, which originally a piece of cake.

Then what is news? “Most journalists agree that the following eight elements make up what is considered ‘news’---immediacy, proximity, prominence, oddity, conflict, suspense, emotions, consequence. ” But most of the case, when something happen, journalists won’t compare these 8 elements before making the decision of reporting the news or not, how long or what details should be reported. They will use their occupational instinct to make the judge in order to become the first one to report the news. But due to the diversity of everyone’s instinct and experience, as well as the media’s industry’s development, every journalist have a different standard of what is news and what is good news in their mind. That’s probably why nowadays, more and more journalists and even researchers will be confused with and argued with the definition of news.

Traditional news theory argues that, when journalists are writing the news, they at least have to mention 6 elements: who, what, where, when, why and how. But nowadays, “there is a sixth W: Why should anyone care about this news?” With the development of internet, people no longer lack of the news and information. Facing with the competition with other media, journalists have to think about how to convince their audiences why they should care about the news. Thus, sensationalism becomes more and more serious. Researchers and scholars criticize all the time, but nothing has changed.

This is the reality happening in the media industry. The news’ definition is developing. The way people deal with news is changing. Debates and criticism is also happening every day. But as long as the report the journalist make can attract most of the people, then it is a piece of news, or even a piece of good news. No matter what is the content of how to report the news. Reflection and criticism always happen later. There is a wall exist between the media industry and the academic research. To me, this is already not a piece of news.

http://aboutpublicrelations.net/ucturkington.htm
http://www.fairtest.org/arn/What%20is%20News.html
http://www.ypp.net/pdfs_writersguide/unit1.pdf