What is News?
News is anything that is interesting and relates to areas of the culture that would be of interest to your audience. It should be put before them briefly, clearly so that they can read it, picturesquely so that they remember it and accurately so that they can be guided by it.
The information that gets put onto the news line-up in a newspaper, on TV, or posted on a news Internet site is the decision of people who work for a particular organisation. These are called editors, news directors or news managers, and they take recommendations from reporters, assistant editors, and many others within their organization.
They judge what is news and decide whether to report it in detail or in a less detailed manner, later on in the bulletin or on Page One of the paper. This is how they distinguish the big news from the rubbish, and it is the same way that everyone else judges things when they talk about one thing rather than another.
Generally speaking, there are five basic criteria that we use to decide what is news. These are:
New, Unusual, Interesting, Significant and About People.
It will be important for you to know that most news is about people and the things they do, but there are some non-human sources of news such as a cyclone, bush fire, drought or volcanic eruption which make stories too.
Using cell phone cameras and text-messaging, people are now reporting events that used to be well known by traditional media only after they had occurred. This is changing how we think about and get news.