What Is The Importance Of News In A Digital World?
The media portrays serious news stories with a lot of hype that often damages credibility and causes people to form an opinion before even having the chance to read the full story. Examples of news to watch out for are local stories that mention race, religion or other situations that are sensitive. Examples of news that’s going to be around for a while. For example, someone in Canada found out that her passport had been stolen. Then an immigration lawyer got her back on track, but the whole event was captured on video and the news reports caused a huge stir.
This is why we need news standards and guidelines. Without having a standard to guide all news sources, it will lead to unintentional misrepresentation and, even worse, mistakes. Imagine if you saw a story about a big new development in New York City and the next day you saw someone else saying that the same thing. Both statements would be false. The first one wasn’t newsworthy because it was based on hearsay, while the second one was newsworthy because it was based on factual information.
The standard that news readers need to keep in mind is what is known as the six values of news. They are: general, breaking, sports, local, international, celebrity/entertainment. General stories are those that inform and notifies. Breaking news are those that are unexpected. For example, a city planning commission starts getting complaints about something that is going on in the city. A sports event may result in someone being hurt or a crime being committed.
The key is to look for news stories that fit your profile. If you find a story idea that interests you, simply write down the news value and the interest that you have in that subject. Then you can check to see if the story idea is newsworthy and meets your profile. If you don’t like the news, you will be able to pass it by.
The last value of a news article is the importance of the lead in the story. The lead is a person, an event or even a new discovery that leads to the newsworthy item. For example, a new study out in journals of public health finds that aspirin works better if it is taken with Vitamin C. In an article, someone claims that the vitamin C increases the effect of aspirin, but they didn’t get the lead to this finding through the article. That lead would have been lost without the article. It didn’t matter what the lead was, or what the subject was, or what the context was. The lead in the news article was newsworthy because it was newsworthy.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the newspaper or television station shouldn’t have any news items of importance in them. After all, a public media outlet is there to inform the people of their world. What is important is that news can be both newsworthy subject matter. The same goes for internet news and posts on blogs.