What is News?
News is any item that catches the eye of people. It may involve the weather (especially when it is unusual), food, money, health and entertainment. People tend to like to know about things that affect their daily life or their security in the case of crime reports. This information provides people with the knowledge they need to make choices about their lives and the world around them.
News comes in many forms – written words in newspapers and magazines, moving pictures on television and radio or the written words and sounds of the Internet. Different media convey different aspects of news, and they also require a very different kind of attention from audiences.
The decisions about what makes it into a newspaper or onto a news television programme or the pages of a news website are made by people who work for a particular news organization. These are sometimes called editors or news directors. They sift through the recommendations of reporters and assistant editors to decide what will become news.
What is newsworthy can vary from place to place. For example, a man biting a dog is news in one society but not in another, where dogs are eaten at feasts. Similarly, a coup in the next-door country might be big news but a similar coup in your own city might not be. The most important thing is that news has to be new, unusual, interesting or significant – in short, it must be worth talking about.