Dentify and analyse some of the main ways in which stories are Assignment

Dentify and analyse some of the main ways in which stories are selected by news organisations and Outline and analyse the claim - Assignment Example News about disasters follows a predictable pattern i.e. early reports and late reports. Early reports are dependent on the inconclusive information about the event from the witnesses on the severity of the disaster. Later stories offer more conclusive and newsworthy details on the event and occur after several days (Schlesinger, 1987). Created news is more frequent that unpredicted news. These emanates from the behaviour of an individual or an organization committing a certain act in a bid to seek publicity. For instance, the public relations official may participate in the process of news making to seek publicity. Enterprise news is created when the reporters engage in acting rather than reacting to disaster reporting. Enterprise news is common with investigative reporting. The regular sources of news can be summarised into the news net, institutional sources such as news beat, pre-selection of events such as the case of news diary and manufactured news such as the public relations events. A piece of information should be newsworthy for it to be published. According to Lester M. (2002) and Galtung & Ruge, (1965), the newsworthiness of a story is determined by news values. The first is impact whereby a story is more newsworthy if it appeals to a greater number of people. Timelessness is also crucial whereby more recent stories are more newsworthy compared to old pieces of information. However, timelessness is also relative as an event could have occurred in the past but realized lately. Occurrences based on prominence are also newsworthy. For instance, stories related top prominent individuals such as celebrities or powerful personalities appeal to the masses. Proximity of the news article to the audience attracts their interest. Proximity can be gauged either geographically or depending on the expected expectations and interest of the public. The bizarreness of a piece of news article attracts the attention of the public. Popular stories among the public are t hose related to conflict or controversy. News currency promotes newsworthiness whereby an idea whose time has come attracts the attention of the audience. The idea assumes a life of its own and captures the public imagination for some time. The final key consideration is the human interests whereby most people are interested in those stories that are possess an amusing theme. Other factors that determine the news worthiness of a news article include competition; commercial or profession competition of the media may affect the journalists’ endorsement on the value of news given to an article by a rival. For instance, Philo and Berry (2004) portends that the media coverage of the conflicts in Israel was based on competition among the media channels that obtained their news anyhow with some based on false hood. Another factor is time constraints for instance, traditional news media such as radios have strict deadlines and short production periods implying that they are efficient in the coverage of news that can be researched and reported hastily. Logistics is also a determining factor that determines the availability of global communications and functionality of technical or financial resources that determines whether a story will be covered or not. The final process in the selection process is gate keeping i.e. the way in which information is filtered for dissemination. Gate keeping provides the