News Versus Weather – Why It’s Important to Know the Difference!
News is an announcement of things happening in the world. It is usually written to inform people about current affairs or events. Examples of news are when a major earthquake damaged parts of a city, killing at least one individual. An example of a newsworthy event is a newly married couple announcing their impending marriage at a public family event. The public reacts to these newsworthy events by buzzing about them and the people who are involved in the story. The media, on the other hand, publishes news stories for the general public to read.
When an event happens that affects even a country or a city, the event becomes newsworthy. Even when local events are not as dramatic as world-wide catastrophic events, they still become news. Examples include the flooding in New Orleans that started after Hurricane Katrina. All the flood victims were displaced to the point where they had to find a way to survive.
The next question then becomes what is to be done with the news items that become newsworthy. There are a few different options open to the media, but most reporters become stuck with just one method. Since they have to start from scratch with each new event they cover, they end up writing about the same old stories. This leads to what is commonly known as “repetition”. If there are hundreds of news stories on any given day about flood victims or Hurricane Katrina, the average reader will easily be overwhelmed by the subject matter and unable to absorb the vast amount of information.
What can be done about this? One way is for the media to create more than one news item pertaining to the current events. For instance, the first item should be a short report on what has happened, who is involved and how the event came about. Each subsequent story could then be on the subject of the first, covering everything from the first details to the aftermath. Six seconds is not long enough to bore the readers, but it is long enough to get all of the important information to the audience.
Some reporters and anchors are able to bring a fresh and unique perspective to their stories simply by being more creative and being more unusual. Imagine the reaction if an anchor spoke about the lottery while doing a report on AIDS. It would be received almost like a comedy show. But because the anchor is reporting on something as serious as AIDS, the casual observer would quickly draw the wrong conclusions from the ridiculous line of dialogue. Even though the story was unusual and out of the norm, the news value of it made it worth reading despite the fact that the content lacked overall value.
This same principle can be applied to news stories and breaking reports. Sometimes the reporting on breaking news is more important than the actual content of the news item itself. Sometimes the reporting is so outrageous that it actually becomes newsworthy. When this happens, the reader is not learning about a specific person or event, but rather about some strange behavior that he or she has witnessed. Whether the behavior is funny or alarming is not as important as the fact that this is new and that something weird has been observed.