2.00 Intro: What is News?

          So, what is news really? Is it something to be heard? To be seen? Is it something people watch or read? Is it something you can find in a magazine? My response is that news is all of the above. News is a universal entity. There’s a saying that it’s not the destination that counts, but the journey. How news travels is just as important as the news that is received. There’s the news that comes from a friend, which may or not be true because everyone has a different perspective and way of retelling an event. Then there’s the news that comes from an article, which usually has more detail and is significantly more reliable. Although the friend’s story may just seem like gossip, it’s still a form of news.

           News is just as much about entertaining as it is about informing. When telling someone a story, the goal is to make it sound as interesting and engaging as possible, so we add in as much details as we can recall, and perhaps even exaggerate a few. It’s the same way with most news. Naturally, people do not want to hear about anything that is not of interest to them. If it’s boring, it won’t be looked at, and much less bought. Journalists want people to read their newspapers, to subscribe to their magazines, to watch their reports on television, so they have to be able to grab the audience’s attention. The more unique and original the story is the better. Charles Anderson, an American journalist who wrote for the New York Tribune, put it best when he said “When a dog bites a man that is nothing new. But when a man bites a dog? That’s news.”

 According to the Oxford Dictionary, news is “newly received information, especially about recent events”, and whether it is taken from a reliable source or not is irrelevant. Although that’s considered to be the “official” definition of news, journalists and writers alike have their own interpretation and ideas. As American journalist Kurt Loder states, “News is anything that is interesting, that relates to what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience.” To put it simply, news is anything newsworthy. News varies depending on the topic of interest, and adjusts for the audience its targeting. News is quite literally for the people and by the people, but isn’t always of the people. If you have ever started a conversation with “Hey, did you hear about..?” Or, “You will not believe what happened the other day…” then you were just about to share some news.