Module 10: Studying the News
This module is divided into two basic sections. The first section deals with newspaper or print news. The second section deals with television and radio news.
From studying this module, you should learn to do the following:
- understand and apply the attributes for what contributes to making the news “newsworthy.”
- analyze the different sections of a newspaper and the functions of those different sections in terms of audience use and effectiveness.
- understand the development of news, particularly in terms of the rise of Web-based news.
- understand the ideological perspectives shaping the news related to issues of bias or news selection.
- understand how corporate ownership of the news influences bias and selection.
- understand ways of assisting students in production of their own news.
- understand issues associated with the focus on entertainment aspects of local television news.
- understand elements of television news story selection related to quality and presentation.
- understand and examine issues related to political coverage, war coverage, diversity, and commercialism associated with television news.
In studying the news, a major initial concept to examine with students is the question as to what constitutes “news.” Students could consider different examples of recent community or school events—passing of a school bond referendum, opening of a new business, a bank robbery, discovery of pollution in a river, death of a prominent citizen, etc. and determine whether or not these events would be considered to be “news” in the context of their own personal conversations/gossip, the local radio station, the local town newspaper, the local regional newspaper, the local television news station broadcast, and a national newspaper. In doing do, they could consider the following criteria to determine the extent to which these events are “news”:
- significance. Does the event have some significance for certain people? What is considered to be significant for some may not be significant for others. Significance may also depend on the interests, needs, and knowledge of certain audiences. An environmentalist may perceive the pollution of a river as highly significant, but not perceive a bank robbery as significant. Students could examine some of the most significant news stories during the 21st Century and discuss why these events were considered to be significant:
Stories of the Century
Webquest: creating newspaper reports on the major stories of the 20th century:
- relevance. The relevance of certain events may also depend on audiences’ interests, needs, and knowledge. A group of high school students may perceive passing of a school bond referendum as highly relevant to their educational future, while perceiving the opening of a new business as irrelevant to their lives.
- unusualness/sensational. In some cases, stories of unusual or sensational events are perceived of as “news” because they attract audiences’ attention or are entertaining to audiences. For example, stories from the “News of the Weird” archive
focus on bizarre, strange events such as the following:
For an anniversary tribute to Sept. 11 victims, the city of Jersey City, N.J., planned to release a flock of doves at a downtown ceremony, but since officials waited until the last minute to order the doves, all suppliers were sold out. Jersey City wound up having to use pigeons (which had been caged most of their lives), and observers at the solemn ceremony were forced to witness the awkward birds smashing into office-building windows, plunging into the Hudson River and careening into the crowds. [New York Times, 9-19-02]
- practical. Audiences may also consider something as “newsworthy” if it has practical, utilitarian value for them. This accounts for the increase in the amount of information on medical/health or consumer topics that audiences may perceive as useful for their own personal health or shopping, even though the information provided may not be considered as highly significant in terms of political or economic considerations.
- threatening audience beliefs. Audiences may also perceive news that challenges or threatens their beliefs and attitudes as not newsworthy. They may perceive such news as “bad news” or as news that does not belong in a newspaper or broadcast given their own ideological perspectives.
Webquest: elements of news
Considering community needs/interests. In applying these different criteria, in deciding to include or emphasize a particular story, a newspaper or TV news editor may take local community needs and interests into account, asking the question, is this event significant or relevant to my community’s own needs and interests? These considerations are central in considering whether a news story should be considered as “significant” for inclusion in the news. In determining whether to include a local crime story, an editor may consider whether information about that crime would enhance the community’s larger needs and interests. However, an editor may also believe that a crime story will attract attention, even though it may not necessarily enhance the community’s larger needs and interests, thereby considering the sensational nature of the story to be a more important criterion than the significance or relevance of the story.
Other factors related to news value
- Frequency: the time-span of an event and the extent to which it 'fits' the frequency of the newspaper's or news broadcast's schedule…. Background to the news, though - e.g. economic, social or political trends - is less likely to make it into the news as such trends take a long time to unfold.
- Threshold:How big is an event? Is it big enough to make it into the news?
- Unambiguity: How clear is the meaning of an event? The mass media generally tend to go for closure, unlike literature, where the polysemy of events is exploited and explored. An event such as a murder, a car crash and so on raises no problems, its meaning is immediately grasped, so it is likely to make it into the news. In an Observer article of June 11 2000, Peter Preston quoted the results of a survey of 300 leading US media professionals across the US, conducted by The Columbia Journalism Review, which revealed that the most regular reason why stories don't appear is that they are 'too complicated'.
- Meaningfulness: How meaningful will the event appear to the receivers of the news?
- Consonance: Does the event match the media's expectations? Journalists have a pretty good idea of the 'angle' they want to report an event from, even before they get there. If the media expect something to happen, then it will.
- Unexpectedness: 'Man bites dog' is news. If an event is highly unpredictable, then it is likely to make it into the news.
- Continuity:Once an event has been covered, it is convenient to cover it some more - the running story
- Reference to élite persons: The media pay attention to important people. Anyone the media pay attention to must be important.
Civic journalism. A key concept in considering the relationship between the news and the local community is the idea of “civic journalism”—the extent to which a newspaper attempts to foster public discussion and debate about local issues with the intent of solving problems and changing public policy. Journalists who are interested in civic journalism believe that journalists should be actively engaged in not only reporting news, but also in influencing and fostering change. A study, "Measuring Civic Journalism's Progress," conducted at the University of Wisconsin for the PewCenter for Civic Journalism found that “at least one fifth of all U.S. daily newspapers -- 322 of the nation's 1,500 dailies -- practiced some form of civic journalism between 1994 and 2001, and nearly all credit it with a positive impact on the community.” Most all of the project employed an "explanatory" story frame to cover public issues instead of a more traditional "conflict" frame, which often reports two opposing viewpoints. The projects also allowed citizens to voice their perspectives.
The study found that:
1. Some form of civic journalism was practiced in at least a fifth of all American newspapers, in almost every state and in every region. This figure is the most conservative possible, and we believe the actual number may be closer to double.
2. There is a clear pattern of development in civic journalism content, as journalists learned in what appear to be phases. Civic journalism generally started with elections, moved fairly quickly to coverage of general community issues and problems, and then began to address specific community issues.
3. There is a parallel development of technique. Civic journalism coverage was "invented" through a series of practical experiments in the early 90s. It was extended through the attempt to develop daily and weekly routine from the mid-90s on. And with the advent of the Internet, new interactive approaches to civic news coverage emerged starting in the late 90s.
4. The goals of news organizations show a strong commitment to the traditional public news values of informing the public and, to a lesser extent, the civic and democratic values of problem-solving and increased deliberation.
5. New ways of reporting the news have emerged that help citizens deliberate on important problems, address and solve them, and increase their voices in the community and in the pages of the papers.
6. A substantial minority of papers, about 35%, continued their civic journalism involvements for three or more years, with almost 20% practicing for more than four years.
7. Finally, there is significant (but not conclusive) evidence of impact in communities where civic journalism is practiced. About a third of all cases showed some community/newspaper partnerships. More than half reported evidence of improved public deliberation. Other results included: use of projects by others, improved citizens skills, new civic organizations formed, and increased volunteerism.
For a discussion of the relationship between the news and a local community, see the following chapter “Community as the Context for News” from the book by Cheryl Gibbs and Tom Warhover
Getting the Whole Story: Reporting and Writing the News, Guilford Press.
See also Kathleen HallJamieson, The Interplay of Influence: News, Advertising, Politics, and the Mass Media, Wadsworth.
Activity: making editorial decisions. Students could assume the role of editors of their local school or community papers. They must then decide on whether they should include or exclude the previously developed events from their paper.
For teaching units from The Media and American Democracy site on “newsworthyness” and media ethics issues
New York Times Lesson Plans: “Nothing but the News: Exploring and Creating "Important" News Stories”
Teaching The News Itself
One strategy for teaching the newspaper as a media form is to use it to have students keep informed about current news events/information.
The New York Times Learning Network
CNN: For Your Information: ways of integrating current events into teaching
USNews Classroom
Scholastic News for students (grades 5-8)
Newsweek for students
Education Time Magazine
Education World: Ten activities for teaching with newspapers
Students should also be aware of the range of different types of local newspapers, including local/suburban weekly papers such as those in Minnesota:
specialty newspapers such as the Asian-American Press:
college/university papers:
Analysis of Newspaper Sections and Functions
Students need to understand the functions of different sections of the newspaper. One useful site to do that is the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s “Walk Through the Newspaper” site
which takes students through the following sections of the newspaper:
The different kinds of news
Get acquainted with the different kinds of news and news stories.
The different levels of news
Familiarize yourself with the different levels of news stories.
Editorial and commentary
Learn the components of the editorial and commentary pages.
Sports
Acquaint yourself with the components of the sports section.
Comics
Familiarize yourself with the comics section and the nationwide distribution of comic strips.
Business and stocks
Learn about business news and stock market listings in the Business section.
Advertising
Get acquainted with the different kinds of advertising.
In analyzing the typical newspaper, students could then examine aspects of newspaper design and layout by comparing different newspapers, using even on-line versions, although the differences between the original paper versions are more pronounced. They could identify the uses of certain typeface/type styles, the font size and nature of headlines, the “grid” (the number of columns, the size and number of pictures, and how the news is organized in a paper. They could also identify instances of design that are effective in terms of ease of reading versus less effective in terms of hindering their reading.
Photography. Photography also plays a major role in news reporting. Photos should function to aptly illustrate the content and gist of a story. On the following PBS site, Jeff Mermelstein, an award-winning photographer shares his thoughts on photojournalism, particularly photos he took of Ground Zero that appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere.
The site contains two photo editors commenting on Jeff Mermelstein's photos, as well as a photographic tour with Jeff as he talks photos in different parts of Manhatten.
For a Power Point presentation of various design features, “Attracting Readers Through Effective Design” by Michael T. Shepard:
Shepard cites a study on how readers process information on a newspaper page that employed devices tracking readers’ eye movements (“Eyes on the News”, by Dr. Mario Garcia and Dr. Pegie Stark, Poynter Institute for Media Studies).
Readers process photographs 75 percent of the time
Readers process headlines 56 percent of the time.
Text is processed only 25 percent of the time.
Larger photos attract more readers – pictures 3 columns or wider are
processed 92 percent of the time.
Mug shots are processed less than half of the time.
Informational graphics are read 73 percent of the time.
Jim Miller identifies instances of effective versus ineffective newspaper design on the Air Force Reserve news
Effective Newspaper Design
Photographs and line art draw readers into the newspaper and entice them to read stories from beginning to end. Varied camera angles, leading lines, dramatic cropping, and dominant and supporting photos stop readers in their tracks. Photographs feature no more than three people to identify. Good stand-alone on the job photos usually focus on one person showing most of his or her face.
Layout and design elements step readers through the newspaper on an organized, easy-to-follow path. Headline, photo, art, and copy placement follow conventional newspaper or magazine form. Reader "speed bumps" (spot color, screens, pull quotes, drop heads, and other devices) are infrequent to provide impact when necessary.
Ineffective Newspaper Design
Photographs include close-ups taken from too far away, feature a cast of thousands, and look like they were taken from a speeding car. Cropping is an agricultural term. Pictures in a photo feature are as close to the same size as possible so readers will view each one with equal dismay. The editor omits cutlines entirely or merely lets readers guess who is in the picture. Line art does a better job as filler than as a magnet to stories.
Readers jump from news to feature to editorial, to news to feature to editorial, to news to feature to editorial, and so on. Readers struggle through numerous page jumps, copy set wider than the eye was meant to scan, paragraphs that contain as many sentences as possible and a mine field of dingbats, fillers and trapped white. Headlines are all caps, down style, flush right and centered—all under the same department heading. Graphic devices, such as spot color, are applied in much the same manner as a 5-year-old putting on lipstick for the first time — messy and lots of it.
Students could also analysis the use of various formats or design features employed in newspapers or news websites. Students could go on the Newseum site of daily front pages from 193 papers from 27 countries
and could compare differences in newspapers’ or websites’ uses of picture sizes, organization of sections, uses of certain fonts/typeface, the number of columns, mastheads, headlines, graphs, charts, and ads.
Students could analyze the quality of photojournalism on the Newseum site, “Photojournalist of the Month,” examining the photos of award-winning photojournalists:
For further reading:
Newton, J. H. (2001). The burden of visual truth: The role of photojournalism in
mediating reality. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Genre features. Students could also examine the genre features employed in a news report. For example, while stories typically follow the traditional expository format of the “5-w’s”: who, what, where, when, and why, writers may employ narrative to frame their stories in an unfolding narrative sequence in an attempt to engage their audiences. Many reports often begin with setting the scene in which the reporter describes himself in the context of an event or story: “I’m walking down the street of a quiet, suburban neighborhood in which everyone knows everyone else. No one ever believed that one of their neighborhoods would have committed such a horrific crime.” This use of what Norman Fairclough (1995) describes as the “narrativization” of the news focuses more on the dramatic aspects of new events and less on analysis of ideas or larger institutional forces. However, newspapers readers often are more engaged with such stories, particularly because they are familiar with this genre format on television news, another instance in which television has changed the newspaper.