What is News?
News is a brief, clearly written account of current events. It is presented in a way that makes people want to read it and remember it. It also has a picturesque quality and is, above all, accurate. News is not entertainment, however; entertainment comes from other areas – music and drama on radio and television and newspapers often contain crosswords and other types of entertaining puzzles. The job of news is to inform and educate its audience, but it can amuse them if the subject is right for it.
What does make news is the unexpected, the unusual. The things that happen every day – such as a man going to work on the bus – do not make news, because they are not unusual. A woman falling into a deep lake, on the other hand, is news, because it is an unusual event.
People are interested in famous people – what they do, their lives and how they look. They are also interested in health news, such as hospitals and clinics, medicines, diet and exercise. They are interested in sex news, too, especially when it involves behaviour that is not within society’s generally accepted standards.
When writing a news article, the first thing to do is find out who your audience is. This will tell you how much detail to include. For example, if the audience is young, then an article about a new type of computer game will be of interest, but not to an older audience, which would be more interested in an accident that happened on the railway line. Also, an audience which is local will be more interested in a local event than one which affects the entire country.