1.4 What is news?

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From the course by The University of Melbourne

Journalism Skills for Engaged Citizens

10 ratings

The University of Melbourne

Journalism Skills for Engaged Citizens

10 ratings

This is a course in basic journalism skills, designed for the many people who are now taking advantage of new media to publish news, views and information. For five hundred years, the privilege of being able to publish was enjoyed by very few people – those who had access to a printing press or a radio microphone or a television camera. Now, almost anyone can publish to the world within minutes of being able to do so. But is it journalism? How does a citizen journalist find things out, so they can report facts and news - moving beyond merely braying opinion? And what are the legal and ethical pitfalls to publishing facts that some people might prefer remain secret? Over six weeks, this course teaches the basics of news writing, how to interview people to gain crucial information, how to develop and manage your sources and how to use your legal rights to access public information - and stay on the right side of the law when you publish. We discuss the ethics behind journalism practice, and conduct a mock investigation into local government. This course aims to empower engaged citizens to better participate in the news ecology. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/jj46rxw

From the lesson

What is a Journalist, and What is News?

This week we will discuss what journalism is, what journalists do, and how this has been affected over time by technology. We'll think about the exciting changes of our own time – the first in human history when the means of publication are in everyone's hands. We will then talk about the principles of news writing, and the nature of news. Finally, we will introduce Newstown, a fictitious place in Victoria, Australia. We also attend a news conference held in the Newstown Council Chambers. We will be using Newstown as the basis of our skills based exercises in this MOOC, so please take the time to become familiar with the town and its issues by following the link to Newstown in the course resources.

1.1 What is a journalist? Part A12:36

1.2 What is a journalist? Part B14:16

1.3 Principles of good news writing15:18

1.4 What is news?8:03

1.5 Newstown media conference4:52

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Denis Muller
Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Advancing Journalism
Dr. Margaret Simons
Associate Professor and Director
Centre for Advancing Journalism

There have been lots of attempts to define news,

but they all share two basic ingredients.

It has to be new and it has to be interesting to people.

So, I define news as information that people don't already know and

will probably find interesting.

How do we know if they will find it interesting?

Well, ask yourself, do you find it interesting?

And what is it about the topic that you find especially interesting?

Then ask yourself, why do I find this interesting and what are the particular

pieces of information about this matter that I find most interesting?

Now, you're on your way to understanding what it is about this information

that makes news.

You have to work on it to convert that raw information into news, but

at least you've got a rough idea of why it's news in the first place.

Over time, professional journalists and scholars in journalism have

identified a number of characteristics of news that they call news values.

These aren't values in the moral sense, have nothing to do with honesty or

integrity or fairness or

any of the other moral values that are important in the ethics of journalism.

Here, the word values means qualities of information that make information news.

You can see from this chart that what is news can vary according to the audience.

Some pieces of information are big stories all over the world.

Like the attacks on New York and Washington on September the 11th, 2001.

Or, the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004.

Or the current wars in the Middle East.

The news value that we're talking about here is the news value of magnitude.

Magnitude means the number of people who are affected the size of the event.

And its the most obvious news value.

Another news value is negativity.

Bad news nearly always makes a bigger story than good news.

Conflict usually makes a bigger story than harmony.

The reason is that bad news and conflict tend to be disruptive,

and so may affect people's lives in ways they need to know about.

Other stories are bigger in some places than in others.

Central to this is the idea of the audience.

Who is your audience?

Where are they located?

If the information's about something close to home for them, either geographically or

culturally, it will be a bigger story for them than a similar piece

of information that applies to people or places farther away.

So this idea of proximity has two dimensions.

What we think of as geographic, a dimension, and a cultural dimension.

So geographically,

how close is the event to the people you are writing about, or writing to.

And, to what extent do the people you're writing for

identify with people who were affected by the story.

If they're people like us, generally speaking, it's a bigger story than if

it happens to people with whom we don't have that cultural infinity.

You don't need to worry too much about recency.

News can be news.

Even if it's really quite old, if it's coming to life for the first time.

Another important news value is the news value of prominence.

It has to do with the fame or

the authority of the people that you are reporting upon.

So for example if the prime minister of a country makes a statement.

It's a bigger story than if some ordinary citizen does or

some lesser member of the government.

If a famous person or famous actor does something that's obviously

a bigger story than if just some ordinary citizen does the same thing.

So the news value of prominence has to do with authority and fame.

And then we have this very important news value which I call Pathos,

others call personification.

Has to do with stories that tell us something about the human condition.

About how people are affected by events, stories of personal histories,

something that tells us something about ourselves as human beings.

So there are three more very important news values.

And then there are these.

Surprise, the classic one is man bites dog, instead of dog biting man.

The kind of idea that you get from all sorts of wacky things that

these days come to light often on YouTube or other forms of social media but

things that are unexpected, that's a very important news value.

Clarity, a story which is easy to tell

is usually more news-worthy than the story that's complicated to tell.

Often think of this as black hats and white hats.

If it's easy to distinguish the good from the bad,

the evil doers from those who will bring them into account.

That's easier to tell than a story which is complicated and which requires

you to enter into all sorts of nuanced qualifications of what's going on.

And then there's, I think, a very interesting news value called consonance.

And this is really a news value that says the story that we already know, is

an easier story to tell than one that we don't know, that we're not familiar with.

And in this respect, journalists are a bit like, sort of 15th century

Balladeers who used to go about telling the cultural stories in song or in poems,

and no deviation was permitted from what was already known from the script.

And so, a lot of journalism is, in fact, recounting stories

where the facts are new but the general framework of the story is not new.

It's something which is familiar to us.

And finally, the news value of significance.

How far-reaching is this?

It may not seem very interesting on the surface, but if we dig down a bit,

we find that in fact this piece of information we've uncovered

is going to affect people in quite meaningful ways often.

This news value's important when you're dealing with political matters.

So you may have dug down into some counsel records or into some historical documents.

And you've discovered something there which is going to affect

people's lives in ways that nobody knew.

And didn't anticipate.

That's what the value of significance is all about.

And another factor to take into account are these.

Any particular interests that your audience might have.

In sport, for example, or stamp collecting or gaming.

And any particular needs they may have.

For example, is the language you're writing in their first language or not?

This will affect your choice of words.

The news is always relative.

What might be a big story on a quiet Sunday night

might not make it as a news story at all on a big news day.

So a story's news value is always relative to the news value of other stories

that are around at the same time.

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