When you write news, you are reporting on current events that have an impact on the world around you. These can be anything from a new product launch to a celebrity getting married or breaking news about an attack. Whether you are writing for a newspaper, magazine or online news site, the news you publish must be factual and interesting. You can make it even more engaging by using different media formats. For example, a sports news article could include video clips of the game, quotes from players and a scoreboard.
In the pre-digital world, it was a simple matter to define what made the news: when you turned on the radio or TV and watched Tom Brokaw or your local anchors for half an hour each day, you were watching the news. This approach to news production gave the impression that a single authority was responsible for making the decisions about what was and wasn’t news. But it was not a completely accurate representation of the nature of the news.
Research has shown that audiences are able to make their own judgments about what is and is not news. People also have a mental schema or “gut feeling” about what makes news. This has been defined as the concept of news-ness by Edgerly and Vraga. It describes how the content of a news item will be judged to be news by its audience, and not by news professionals in the media organisation.
The definition of news-ness is based on what the audience will find interesting and significant, rather than what is significant in some abstract sense. It is a judgement that is influenced by the cultural values and norms of the particular society that is being reported on. This is why news about politics in one country may be different to that in another, or why the same event can be interpreted as either significant or not significant depending on where you live.
If you are interested in politics and current affairs, it is a good idea to try to find a source that is regarded as being unbiased. For example, many people in the United States consider the BBC to be an impartial source of news, while a Business Insider survey found that the Associated Press is viewed as the least biased among major US news outlets. In addition, a variety of websites called news aggregators gather various sources of news in one place, allowing you to see different views on the same topic side by side.
If you are learning a foreign language, listening to news broadcasts is a great way to practice your listening skills. You can listen to full-length broadcasts and short news clips, and some news videos come with subtitles so you can work on your reading at the same time. Moreover, most news broadcasters speak clearly and slowly compared to conversational speech. So listening to the news is an excellent way to improve your pronunciation while enjoying a great story at the same time.