Credit: William Navarro via Unsplash
What is News? The answer to this tricky question might depend on viewpoint.
Traditionally, the answer was expressed as: Anything someone might want to read. But it must be factual and only sometimes entertaining.
In the days before the internet, and before social media was a concept, the so-called traditional media -- newspapers, radio and television -- would serve up news.
This was a passive process. Here’s the news and this is what we (the news outlet) believe is important (as judged by the size of the headline or position in the news bulletin).
Now news consumers can actively seek their own news, according to their interests or their beliefs.
The Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation in the US have just finished a study into what is news.
Journalists and editors interviewed agreed that the power to define news has largely shifted to the general public from media gatekeepers.
About three-quarters of reading adults (77%) say they follow the news at least some of the time, and 44% say they intentionally seek out news extremely often or often.
“The definition of what is news is blurring. … News is a combination of what you need to know and what you want to know and what you find intriguing and didn’t necessarily know you wanted to know about,” said David Folkenflik, media correspondent, NPR News.
A key finding of the study is that deciding what is news has become a personal and personalised experience.
“People decide what news means to them and which sources they turn to based on a variety of factors, including their own identities and interests,” the study found.
“Most people agree that information must be factual, up to date and important to society to be considered news.
“Personal importance or relevance also came up often, both in participants’ own words and in their actual behaviours.”
Hard news -- about politics and war - is recognised. And people make a distinction between news and entertainment and opinion.
Information must be factual, up-to-date and important to society to be considered news.
“There is not a one-size-fits-all answer to what ‘news’ is – news means something different to everyone," the study said.
“Several attributes of the information itself – including its topic and source – as well as participants’ own identities and attitudes play a role in how people (knowingly or not) determine whether something counts as news to them.
“And in many cases, asking people to describe what news means to them seems to result in answers about what they believe makes for high-quality news.”
For many, news also includes anything that is “new” or up to date.
US adults are most likely to say that whether something is factual (85%) or whether it is up to date (78%) are major factors in thinking about whether it counts as news.
These are followed by whether the information is important to society, with 72% of respondents considering this a major factor in deciding what’s news.
Americans say news should not be biased.
“Political bias was a recurring – almost universal – concern among participants," the study said.
“Many said they believe that at least some bias from news sources is inherent and unavoidable.
“This creates an underlying current of cynicism regarding whether anyone can completely trust any news source, something journalists have perceived in their audiences as well.”
Getting news is not the main reason many users visit social media sites, but people come across news-related content there.
“Social media is also a space where the lines between news and other content are especially unclear,” the study said.
“It is a reflection of the changing nature of how news is distributed that audiences can, and regularly do, make distinctions about what kinds of content they are seeing as they scroll through social media.
“Part of the scrolling experience is making snap judgments about whether content is news and whether to engage with it.”
The study drew on data from:
- A qualitative online discussion board where (57 adults in the US) privately completed a range of activities, including open-ended questions, canvas illustrations, rating exercises, and video and screen recordings.
- A nationally representative survey of 9,482.
- On-the-record, in-depth interviews with 13 journalists and editors.
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