Understanding News: Definition, Components, and Newsworthiness
News Concept: There is no single definition of news. Each author has provided their own definition. Professor José Luis Martínez Alberto defines it as “A true, unpublished, or currently interesting fact which is imparted to a mass audience. It may be considered as such once it has been collected, interpreted, and valued by the promoting subjects that control the means used for dissemination.”
Three Major Components of News:
- Fact: News is not invented; it originates from a real event.
- Audience: News requires a public to exist. This audience must be massive (a broad, heterogeneous public composed of people with different characteristics who do not know each other).
- Organizers: This refers to those who control the media. They maintain control through the figure of the editor, who represents the company’s board of directors. Editors participate in daily editorial boards to determine what is published. These boards typically include the newspaper’s director, staff managers, editors, and section heads, with section heads having the least influence. A director of a medium must have a journalism degree. Alongside them is the editor, who does not need a degree but directly controls anything that could be damaging to the company. Their function is primarily business-oriented.
A press release is not a fact itself but rather the narration of a fact. The fact is unique, while the stories about it can vary.
Criteria of Newsworthiness
Since the 1980s, the criteria of newsworthiness have been used to determine which events become news. These criteria refer to a list of factors that, when present in events, give them the green light to be considered newsworthy. The authors of these criteria are Galtung and Ruge. Despite being psychologists, they set out to understand how news was received by the audience and identified the elements that made news appealing.
People highlighted a number of elements, which are the criteria:
- Frequency: This refers to the time a medium publishes. Each medium has its own frequency. The internet is often updated constantly. Frequency is important in journalism because events occurring in the hours before publication are more likely to be covered. If something happens after the deadline, it must be significant to change the structure. The media’s frequency often determines whether an event is news or not. Terrorist acts often occur just before major TV news broadcasts, and this is not in vain. The more frequent the medium, the easier it is to disseminate news.
- Threshold of the News: Journalists perceive events with significant consequences as more newsworthy. They can also sense or perceive more in events where important consequences are not predictable, but from the information, the journalist can expect further developments with significant consequences.
- Lack of Ambiguity: Clear, simple facts are prioritized. Ambiguous facts are often avoided because they are time-consuming and may not be published. This explains the presence of communication cabinets, where chiefs of staff are often journalists.
- Significance: This is measured by cultural affinity with the audience. We are more likely to hear about distant people who do things similar to what we do. This becomes news.
- Line with the Audience: This refers to the expectations that the event generates in the audience. Some facts are important, but their characteristics generate expectations.
- Unpredictability: Rarity or surprise makes an event more appealing. For example, “Child Bitten by Dog” would not be as newsworthy as “Dog Eats Child.”
- Continuity: It is more likely for an event to be newsworthy if it is likely to continue generating data in the future.
- Product Composition: A newspaper is a product. A single fact alone might not be news, but a particular newspaper might need a specific type of news to balance its content, making it newsworthy.
- Socio-cultural Values: Events involving first-world countries and prominent individuals are often considered news simply because of who they are. For example, a politician walking their dog might be considered news.
Three Laws of Newsworthiness:
- The Law of Aggregation: The more factors an event has, the more likely it is to be news.
- The Law of Exclusion: If an event has no factors, it is discarded as news.
- The Law of Complementarity: An event might have many factors, but one factor, even if initially minor, might be very prominent, making the event newsworthy.