News Gathering Overview

News Gathering and Reporting Overview

DECIDING WHAT IS NEWS

News values are the characteristics that help journalists decide what stories merit coverage and to what degree. These values have been formed by tradition, technology, organizational policy, and by economics. The major characteristic values to determine a story’s newsworthiness are:

1. Timeliness To be news, news must be fresh, immediate, and current.

2. Proximity The closer a news event is to your home, the more important you perceive
it to be. In addition to geographical proximity, a news story might have
psychological proximity, which occurs when you identify with the story
topic (health, college, jobs) regardless of the story’s geographical origin.

3. Prominence The more known the news personality, the more likely the news coverage.

4. Consequence Events that affect the majority of a medium’s audience, the greater the
newsworthiness of that story; though all news values are in a sense equal,
consequence usually takes precedence over other news values.

5. Human Interest Story genres of timeless interest: stories about children, treasures, health,
adventures, science, animals, discoveries, best-or-worst of stories, etc.

Economics also plays an important role in determining whether a story is reported. For example, an investigative story might turn up empty but still be run to justify the cost of doing it; in the same manner, a city editor might assign reporters to quick and easy stories before committing them to stories that may prove too costly in terms of manpower hours. Likewise, the expensive investment in news gathering technology (helicopters, studio mini vans, and satellite feeds) also plays a deciding factor in whether a story gets aired; the more dramatic, timely, or expensive the scenario (regardless of its inherent merits), the more likely the story will be covered.

As bottom line profits continue to gain importance in corporate journalism, they may also begin to influence traditional news values in an attempt to focus on the packaging rather than the prod-uct. Another concern with conglomerate ownership is the uncertainty of whether or not a news medium can objectively report on events surrounding its parent corporation.

Other areas of potential concern include aggressive reporting of local businesses (who may ad-vertise with the station or newspaper), favoring story appearance over news substance, and TV news featuring sensationalistic stories in the quest for higher ratings during sweep weeks.


CATEGORIES OF NEWS AND REPORTING

News can be broken down into three broad categories: (1) hard news, (2) features, or soft news, and (3) investigative reports.

Hard News

Hard news is the realm of traditional fact-oriented journalism; it embodies the famous journalis-tic question set of who, what, where, when, why, and how. Hard news generally embraces all but the human interest values, with emphasis on the values of timeliness and consequence. Hard news tends to be the lead off stories in broadcast news or Section 1 of a newspaper.

The Print Media usually delivers news in the traditional inverted pyramid format, wherein the story is reported in a descending order of importance. The first sentence of a hard news story is the lead, a sentence that summarizes the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the story.

The Broadcast Media follows a square format in which the level of important facts remains the same throughout the story and often ends in a summary statement of the story’s relevance to the viewer. TV news uses both hard leads (factual, no nonsense approach) or soft leads (feature-like approach designed to grab the viewer’s interest). In addition to being written largely to comple-ment the story’s video tape, broadcast news is written in a simpler, more informal conversational style than print news.

Soft News (or feature news)

Soft news, which covers a wide spectrum of topics, usually relies heavily on the human interest news value, stories that appeal to people’s curiosity, sympathy, skepticism, or amazement. Fea-ture stories are entertaining, and they can be about places, people, animals, mysteries, oddities, or products. Many TV and print vehicles are based primarily on soft content, such as Entertainment Tonight, or the “Life” section of USA Today. One thing is for certain--audiences love them.

Investigative Reports

Investigative stories are designed to unearth significant information about matters of public im-portance through the use of non-routine information-gathering methods. Stories such as political scandals, business cover-ups, drug trafficking, and institutional inefficiencies are typical targets. The investigative piece also requires considerable time and money to complete. In print media, stories usually take the form of an extended series over a period of several days; in the broadcast media, an investigative story might be take several minutes each day on an evening newscast (a mini-doc) or it might take from 15-120 minutes on a news magazine show or documentary.

THE NEWS FLOW

Print Media

There are two main sources of print news, staff reports and wire services. There are other con-tributing sources as well (syndicates, columnists, public relation handouts, and government re-ports), but they generally have less consequence for the paper’s readers. The city editor heads a paper’s reporting staff, assigning stories to two types of reporters: the beat reporter (covers tra-ditional news-making areas such as fire and police departments, government, schools, and busi-ness), and the general assignment reporter. The managing editor is responsible for the overall daily preparation of the paper. These people, including others such as the editor-in-chief, copy editor, layout editor, and the photo editor play a part in the gatekeeping process.

Broadcast Media

Broadcast news sources are fairly similar to print sources (local beats, general assignment report-ers, wire services, syndicates, and, for affiliate stations, network resources). In terms of organi-zation, the news director is responsible for the news program itself, while the executive producer oversees other producers in charge of various news programs (morning, evening, and late night). Typical responsibilities for a news program producer might include:

. deciding what stories are covered, by whom, and in what way
. deciding the order in which stories appear in the newscast
. determining the amount of time each story is given
. writing copy for some stories
. integrating live reports into the newscasts

Working with the producer is the assignment editor who assigns stories and monitors reporters and the TV production crews. Equally important people to the program include the news an-chors (the “glamour” jobs), camera crews, sound editors, writers, artists, and tape editors.

Online Media

An online news organization may or may not be integrated with its parent print or broadcasting parent, but the news flow and production process is essentially similar to that of the traditional media. Obviously, the new job responsibilities in this arena are the web site designer (in charge of what the news site looks like), and the web editor (who decides, among other things, how of-ten the site will be updated and which multimedia elements to use with the stories and how).


TECHNOLOGY

. ENG Electronic News Gathering allows portable cameras to beam images back to the studio

. SNG Satellite News Gathering allows live global satellite feeds from anywhere on the planet
While ENG and SNG technologies allow TV stations to provide live coverage, that news is also unedited and unfiltered, and therefore subject to elements of trivia, irrelevance, and inaccuracies.


THE WIRE SERVICES

AP stands for the Associated Press wire service and UPI stands for United Press International; they are our country’s two biggest news wire services and together provide you with most of the news about what’s going on outside of your local community.

In short, wire services work like this: first a wire correspondent covers a story and sends it along to the local bureau chief; if the story is deemed to be important or appropriate enough, the bureau chief forwards it to the state bureau. The evaluation process is repeated again for the next higher levels, regional, national, and global. The purpose of a wire service is to provide newspapers with correspondents and coverage that the papers couldn’t otherwise afford. Newspapers pay for wire service news on a sliding scale: the bigger the paper’s circulation, the more they pay.

The AP has about 145 domestic bureaus and about 95 foreign bureaus, and in 2000 the AP had about 15,000 customers worldwide, including about 1,700 newspapers, 5,000 radio and TV sta-tions, and about 500 cable systems.

Because of continuing long-time financial problems, UPI has only six domestic bureaus and now concentrates on providing news to Internet clients such as Excite.

The AP and UPI do have other competition, most notably The New York Times News Service and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. Some newspaper chains and a few international wire services (Britain’s Reuters and France’s Agence-France) provide additional competition. Finally, there are specialized information services now available on the Internet, such as Internet Wire and CNet.


MEDIA DIFFERENCES IN NEWS COVERAGE

Print media have the potential for in-depth reporting and lengthy analysis, elements usually miss-ing from broadcast journalism. A typical news broadcast, printed out, would usually take up less space than a single newspaper page. Broadcast news proponents counter by saying that print journalism is slow, old-fashioned, dull, and doesn’t have the space to print the many images used in a typical TV news broadcast.

Critics of online journalism suggest that many web journalists are too quick to post stories, don’t check their facts as thoroughly as traditional journalists, and are slow to post corrections to news stories.

The truth, however, is that all three mediums have unique strengths and weaknesses, and they all play crucial roles in keeping the public informed.
Words and Pictures

Both print and online news is organized by space while TV stories are sorted by time. The in-herent characteristics of each media, therefore, have an impact on what news gets covered and how. Some observers point out that TV is better at transmitting experience or impressions while print and online media are better at providing facts and information. Newspapers and online sites also have more permanence, making re-reading and researching stories, even complicated ones, fairly easy to do. Broadcast stories, on the other hand, are designed for one-time exposure, and complex stories are often difficult to accurately convey to the viewer. Broadcast news does have strong and unique advantages, which is now shares somewhat with online journalism, in-cluding immediacy, sound, and moving images.

Print, Online, and Broadcast Journalists

Another difference between the three media is that the appearance and personality of the broad-cast reporter are important parts of the process. Repeated exposure often turns TV anchors into stars in themselves, with audiences often developing a personal relationship with the anchors. By contrast, print and online reporters remain relatively anonymous, identified, if at all, only by their byline under a news story.

News Consultants

News consultants work for all three news media, although their impact is more apparent in the broadcast area. Consultants introduced audience surveys to local stations in order to make rec-ommendations to management based on what the public said they wanted to see in local news, not on what journalists think should be in the news, which is a considerable shift in the tradi-tional news value system and gatekeeping process. Since news programs are the top revenue source for TV stations, and bigger audience ratings directly equate to larger revenues, broadcast-ers listen carefully to news consultants. One result has been a news homogenization effect across the country, wherein one news broadcast looks and sounds pretty much like any other in the country; this effect is largely due to station owners relying on the same pool of news consult-ants.

Similarities in the News Media

Despite their differences, editors and reporters in each media share identical journalistic values: honesty, accuracy, objectivity, fairness, balance, and integrity. To be trusted and believed, jour-nalists must maintain a high level of credibility with their audiences. As such, they have tradi-tionally respected the truth, refused to distort facts, and consciously tried to detach themselves as much as possible from the stories they report. Nonetheless, journalists periodically undergo cri-ses of confidence, when many people begin to doubt that journalists are telling them the com-plete truth or are using questionable methods to uncover news stories. And credibility, above all other factors, is paramount in order to keep a relationship of integrity and trust with the public.

INTERMEDIA COMPARISONS

A 2000 news survey turned up a surprising trend in how Americans get their news: the Internet is increasingly becoming a major information source (30 percent of people go online for news at least once a week). At the same time, viewership for network and local news has declined, while reliance on print and cable as news sources has remained stable. Although in decline, TV news shows still retain the highest credibility rating with the American public.


NEWS ONLINE

General news web sites tend to be visited most often (MSNBC, CNN.com, CNET.com, etc.). Online audiences also have the ability to customize their news, allowing people to choose what blend of news coverage they prefer. Another major advantage of online news sites is that much of their information remains accessible, and user searchable, in archived stories.

From the journalist’s perspective, the Internet now permits a much greater ability to do first-hand research, certainly a quicker, more convenient, and often more comprehensive way of research than on-site visits. With the Internet’s wide array of communication tools, journalists are calling the Internet the most significant advance in news-gathering tools since the telephone.

Online reporters must also be able to mine facts from Internet-based sources as well as master all its communication outlets; these skills are collectively called computer-assisted reporting. An online journalist’s writing skills must also include a new ability to weave appropriate hyperlinks into a story, which provide related or background information for that story. E-journalists also need to know how to incorporate sound bytes, video clips, and even establish audience interac-tive links (bulletin board access) to help round out major stories.

With all its advantages, online journalism raises an equal number of serious new issues about the profession, such as: should online journalists be expected to have the same formal training as traditional journalists? What are the legal and ethical standards for online journalism? Should online news sources be held to the same credibility standards as traditional news sources?