When I was a journalism student, I had to write about the meaning of “news”. There are plenty of definitions out there, but the handiest one seemed to be “something that you didn’t know yesterday”.
Of course, it’s an incomplete answer because there are many things we didn’t know yesterday that are so mundane that we have no interest in knowing them at all.
A more complete definition might also include something about the event being relevant to the audience, or being somehow unusual or unexpected. For example, a car accident down the street from where I live is more interesting to me than an equivalent event in a town in Armenia, but for an Armenian person it may be the other way around. However, if the car accident in Armenia involved a Volvo being driven by a chimpanzee and a semi-trailer carrying a load of bananas, then we’d both be interested.
The problem with journalism is that you can’t just sit around waiting for the news to come to you. Unless you work for one of those aggregation sites that merely put a spin on stories already published on the web and wire services, you have to go out and find the news for yourself.
And that involves going to places where you anticipate that something newsworthy will emerge: say, local council meetings, speeches by dignitaries or courts of law. And, of course, sporting fixtures.
It is, again for example, only natural that the media would cover a sermon by the Pope. And so, every so often, we get news stories the Pope calling for peace, love and harmony. Occasionally, especially, with the current pope, we get something considered a little left-field, which tends to suggest he supports a few causes that popes are generally shy to talk about. But, more often than not, it’s generally pretty much the same, worthy thing, and it gets a good run online, in newspapers and on news bulletins. That’s often because anything associated with the Catholic church generally lends to good visuals — they sure know how to put on a colourful show, with lots of ceremony, bling and interesting costumes — but it’s also because it would be a waste of resources if they didn’t run something they’d spent a lot of time in effort in covering.
In other words, you know you’ll be in the news when you call a media conference and the media actually turn up. (And you know you’re yesterday’s news when, as the former Queensland premier Campbell Newman did recently, you hold a book signing and nobody turns up.)
As much as covering speeches and council meetings are a journalist’s bread and butter (or they used to be when there were enough journalists to do these things in every city and town), the stories you get from these events are generally not exciting in the same way as a big, unexpected incident that has you scrambling to the scene.
Well, for most journalists, anyway. There’s always the (probably apocryphal) story about the student reporter who returned to the newsroom after being assigned to cover a council meeting. “Where’s the story?” the editor asked. “There is no story,” the reporter replied, “they had to call off the meeting because the building burnt down.”
A brief earlier version of this post appeared on debritz.net in April, 2006
