The manufacture of News

Adapted from Reporting Processes and Practices: Newswriting for Today’s ReadersEverette E. Dennis & Arnold H. Ismach[1981, Wadsworth Publishing Company, California, USA.]

The case of the best censored stories ie stories that depict conditions, situations and ideas that developed over time

The best censored stories were not published because they did not fit into traditional definitions of news

Deciding what is news is the most important element in the journalistic process

Deciding What’s News

It determines how reporters and editors work

It determines the nature of information that the public gets

The importance of News in Society

• News provides a window on the world, a frame through which citizens learn about their institutions, their leaders, other people and themselves

• It provides the raw materials for social discourse, creating a shared reality for the public

• News brings together information that is otherwise inaccessible and makes it available to everyone at the same time

• It enables governments to inform their publics, and publics to inform their governments

• It focuses public attention and helps set our social and political agendas

What news isn’t

• It’s not the equivalent of truth

• It provides essentially superficial knowledge

• It presents “acquaintance with” rather than “knowledge about” subjects of interest

• It does not involve extensive verification of information

News is superficial because…

• Newspapers & newscasts lack space for thorough treatment of most subjects

• Reporters lack the time and knowledge to report in depth

• Readers lack interest

Journalists generally agree about what news isn’t, but they have real problems identifying just what news is

Deciding what’s news usually isn’t a matter of absolutes, but rather of the relative newsworthiness of different subjects at a given time

Space, time, and competing events determine what is published

Political scientist Leon Sigal suggests that nobody knows what news is because there are no universally shared criteria to define it

Traditional definitions of news

• “when a dog bites a man, that is not news; but when a man bites a dog, that is news” [19th century editor, John Bogart]

• “it is something you didn’t know before, had forgotten, or didn’t understand” [Turner Catledge, an editor of New York Times]

• “news is anything that makes a reader say ‘gee whiz’

• “news is a timely report of facts or opinions that hold interests or importance, or both, for a considerable number of people”

• “news is something newspersons know when they see it, something that scholars ruminate about, something that public officials try to influence”

News must be defined as a journalistic report that presents a contemporary view of reality with regard to a specific issue, event or situation or process [DeFleur and Dennis,1981]

ELEMENTS OF NEWS

• Timeliness: immediacy of events and interests

• Proximity: geographical & psychological closeness

• Prominence: celebrity or notoriety of individuals, places or institutions

• Conflict: disagreement, crisis or competition

• Impact: effect of events, issues, trends &ideas

• Importance: degree to which people need to know about event, and its significance to society

• Oddity: the unique, the bizarre, the unexpected, the infrequent

• Human interest: the degree to which the event appeals to emotion or depicts human drama

a common thread that runs through these 8 elements is ‘events’

Journalists tend to concentrate on events because they are connected to visible action, rather than ideas and trends or issues

The primary factor in making news is visibility of events, ideas, issues and trends to journalists

Organizational factors in News

• Beats

• Deadlines

• Accessibility

• Predictability

• Anticipation of audience interests & acceptance

Three principal factors in editorial decisions

• Traditional news attributes that indicate impact such as consequence, proximity & utility; attributes that indicate psychological appeals, such as novelty, prominence, conflict, drama & human interest; attributes that helps our understanding such as explanation, interpretation, and currency

• Institutional constraints that act to preserve the security of the news organization, such as social forces reflecting bureaucratic influences, socialization of staff members, mutually accepted techniques of handling news, limitations imposed by economic and staff resources

• Factors that determine audience acceptance of information, such as knowledge of what interests the audience.

News situation : reader interests = news value

Readers interests: what people tend to use newspapers/TV/Radio for

• To keep informed about the world around

• To help make decisions about public affairs

• To provide fodder for social discussions

• To feel connected to the outside world

• To obtain tangible information of practical utility

• To reinforce existing beliefs and find out what others believe

• To provide relaxation and entertainment

The cult of objectivityobjectivity is the practice of reporting facts and opinions accurately; it is not concerned with establishing their correctness

objectivity implies fairness & impartiality

The advent of interpretation meant that commitment to objectivity waned

objectivity that prevailed in earlier times gave way to interpretation today due to:

…awareness that it did not produce fair and truthful account of the news

…the advent of TV quickly usurped newspapers for spot news

…rapid changes in society demanded more backgrounding than objectivity could provide

Today’s blend of objective + interpretive reporting has given rise to many story formats that are not based events such as….

Trend Stories

backgrounders

analyses

think pieces

investigative reports

multiple-element stories

At one time in journalism there were only two types of news stories: spot or hard news and the feature

Today, news stories could be backgrounders, interpretives or news analyses and profiles

As we have just seen in this lecture, reporters today write various types of news stories other than spot news

Jimi Kayode MAC 203 Foundations of News Reporting