3. No, news just morphed into another form.
• A new study finds millenials (18-34) are strong news consumers, they
just take an indirect path. Instead of newspapers or digital home pages,
they use social media and search as the two top avenues for finding
news. Facebook is the top way of encountering news.
4. More than 6 in 10
Millennials
regularly keep up
with news and
information when
online
6. What makes news worthwhile to report?
Newsworthiness, a poly-semantic term.
1. Traditional standards of newsworthiness
2. Outside factors of newsworthiness
3. Changing standards of digital news
7. Traditional standards of
newsworthiness
a.k.a., elements of news, news
determinants)
1. Timeliness — News is perishable. It
loses value as it ages. It has to be
current and new.
2. Prominence — Important people are
more newsworthy than others.
Celebrity and high ranking official
are more valuable sources.
3. Proximity — News closer to home
has more news value than that from
far away. This includes cultural
distance as well as physical
distance.
8. Traditional determinants-continued
4. Consequence — That which directly
affects readers has more news value.
5. Oddity - Readers are intrigued by the
unusual or out-of-the-ordinary. Man
bites a dog.
6. Conflict - Readers want to know who
will win in elections, wars, sports, etc.
7. Emotion — Stories that can evoke fear,
anger, sorrow, joy, sympathy, and even
disgust are powerful.
8. Public significance – Stories that has
civic importance.
9. Outside factors – Influence
of advertisers
• News rooms and advertising departments
should be separate. They are expected to have
walls between them like state and religion. But
in reality, that wall can be permeable.
• Sponsored content, or native ads are explicit
cases.
• There are many cases of implicit cases of
influence too.
10. Outside factors – Race,
stereotypes and other tacit
standard of news business.
• Studies show white crime victims are favored in
mainstream media.
• Studies over the past decade by media effects scholar
Travis L. Dixon, an associate professor of
communications studies at the University of California,
Los Angeles, found that minorities are underrepresented
as crime victims in the news.
• Or, white cops shooting black person is more newsworthy
than other cases?
11. Missing white woman syndrome?
• Phrase used by social scientists to
describe the extensive media
coverage, especially in television,
of missing person cases involving
young, white, upper middle class
women or girls.
• Laci Denise Peterson case was an
example of media frenzy. She was
eight months pregnant with her first
child. Her husband, Scott Peterson,
was later convicted of murder in the
first degree for her death
12. New elements of digital media
1. Evolving news: Sickness can be
more powerful than death. Doubt
can be more powerful than truth.
2. Participatory news.
3. Sharable news.
Ex) Gangnam style. Kony 2012.
American idol.
New values shake the traditional
newsworthiness.
13. Let’s think about Kony 2012
• Case of Kony 2012
• Campaign group Invisible
Children Inc. and Jason
Russell released a 30-minute
documentary titled Kony 2012.
• More than half of young adult
Americans heard about Kony
2012 in the days following the
video's release.
14. Apply traditional news standard..
• Consequence?
• Proximity?
• Timeliness?
• Prominence?
Why did become newsworthy to many people?
15. Controversy over Cony 2012
• Hypocrisy?
• Slacktivism?
• Justification of military intervention?
• Even an embezzlement accusation.
Global awareness? Global citizenship?
News was controversial but powerful
16. Participatory news may be
the revival of coffee shop
days of news.
• People consume news. But at the
same time they want to be storytellers
too.
• Now, they have means of expressing
themselves in the digital age.
• Audience participation may be
strongest value of news in digital age.
17. Areas of news
• Lifestyle
• Politics
• Sports
• Entertainment
• International
• Activism.
You will each select two areas of interest, start tweets, and gather online
stories. You will curate your own tweet and other online stories with Storify.
Include Tweets (one of your own too), Texts, Images and Videos.
18. Tips: Localize and personalize large issues
Example: Women’s march, Cortland viewpoint, Cortland Voice
http://cortlandvoice.com/2017/01/23/washington-dc-womens-march-a-
cortland-perspective
Example story: Robert Krulwich and Will Hoffman, NPR Online
• To tell the complicated story of health care for NPR Online, Krulwich
and Hoffman zeroed in on the personal tales of a few individuals.
• http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/121158190/a-
locksmith-s-tale-and-other-health-care-stories
/
19. Tips: Generalize what you see around you
• Student example.
• http://pgmediaandproductionco.businesscatalyst.com/index.html
• A Storify story about racial hate sign on SUNY Cortland campus.
• This story is like a prototype. Has huge potential to be in-depth news
with reactions or contexts added.
• What follow up coverage would you do if you were the author?
20. What people have said about news
• “The real news is bad news”. Marshall Mcluhan, Canadian
communications theorist, 1911-1980
• “Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because
with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse
me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost”.
Napoleon Bonaparte, French Emperor, 1769-1821
• “News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to
read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead”
Evelyn Waugh, British author, 1903-1966
• http://www.jibjab.com/originals/what_we_call_the_news
