Types of News

The day’s events contrasted as sharply as night and day, an analogy many journalists later used to summarize what happened.

During the day, President Bill Clinton’s lawyers, led by Charles F.C.s Ruff, launched the defense of the president before the U.S. Senate. Clinton was only the second president in the history of the country to stand trial in the Senate on articles of impeachment. Ruff told the senators that Clinton’s conduct with Monica Lewinsky and his efforts to hide that conduct from the public and investigators were reprehensible but did not warrant the president’s removal from office.

That night, Clinton himself stood before the representatives who had impeached him and the senators who would judge him to deliver the State of the Union Address. Clinton made no mention of the impeachment trial but confidently set out a legislative program for the coming year that included bolstering the Social Security system and improving education.

Many of the next day’s newspapers ran front-page stories about both the Senate trial and the State of the Union Address. And some of those newspapers described the events in similar terms. “Night and Day,” proclaimed the headline in the Charleston (S.C.) Gazette. “A Day of Denials, A Night of Oratory,” said The Day of New London, Conn. And “Judging Clinton by day and his ideas by night” was the headline in the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News.

These widely separated newspapers selected the same stories and played them in similar ways because the journalists at each were evaluating the day’s events by similar sets of news values- values they have developed through years of experience. Selecting news stories to publish in a newspaper or air on a news broadcast is a subjective process-an art, not a science. Journalists possess no scientific tests or measurements to help them judge a story’s newsworthiness. Journalists have tried to define news, but no single definition has won widespread acceptance. Also, no definition acknowledges all the factors affecting the selection process. Walter Lippmann, a reporter and columnist, said news is “what protrudes from the ordinary. . . a picture of reality on which [people] can act.” Another journalist, Nicolas Tomalin, defined news as “things that people don’t want to be known.” And television commentator David Brinkley said news is “what I say it is.”

Journalists recognize two major types of news: hard and soft. “Hard news” usually refers to serious and timely stories about important topics. The stories may describe a major crime, fire, accident, speech, labor dispute or political campaign. Journalists call hard news “spot news” or “straight news.” “Breaking news,” a similar label, refers to events occurring, or “breaking,” now.

“Soft news” usually refers to feature or human-interest stories. Soft news entertains and in forms. It may make readers laugh or cry, love or hate, envy or pity. While still newsworthy news often is less timely than breaking news. Consequently, editors can delay soft stories to make room for more timely stories. Soft stories also may use a less formal style of writing) more anecdotes, quotations and descriptions.

No journalists are more likely to classify news as “good” or “bad.” Many critics a media claim news organizations today focus too much on bad or negative news. Spiro T. Agnew, vice president to Richard Nixon, once called journalists “nattering nabobs of negativism.” More recently, DeeDee Myers, former press secretary to President Clinton, said reporters have the philosophy that “good news is no news.”

Earl Foegen, a professor of business at Winona State University, notes that news organizations seem to be obsessed with killing, death and conflict almost to the exclusion of positive news. Foegen claims news organizations focus on negative news because they believe it sells papers or increases ratings, but the practice actually may turn audiences away as they bee saturated with a constant barrage of negative stories. Foegen recommends news organizations provide a better balance of negative and positive news as a means to draw readers and raise level of news organizations’ social responsibility. David Brinkley, formerly of ABC News, has criticized local newscasts for their emphasis on bad news. Brinkley complained:

There’s a tired old cliche that news is about a man biting a dog. That’s silly. News is something worth knowing, something you didn’t know already. I don’t look at local news much. I’m tired of seeing stories about crime on the sidewalk: blood, knives, guns, death and destruction. I don’t like the stories about bodies on sidewalks. It’s of no interest except, of course, to the family of that body on the sidewalk.

Systematic studies have found, however, that most people exaggerate the amount of crime and violence reported by the media. Dozens of studies have examined the issue and found individual newspapers devote 2 percent to 35 percent of their space to violence. On average, one-tenth of newspaper content concerns violence. Other critics claim that the news media are becoming detached from the audiences they are supposed to serve. James Fallows, former editor of U.S. News & World Report and author of “Breaking the News: How the News Media Undermines American Democracy,” says the news media “define the news in narrow and destructive ways.” Fallows criticizes the media for focusing on the process rather than the news. In stories about public issues, the news media tend to cover the issues as feuds between political opponents instead of informing audiences about the issues. Such reporting tends to turn off audiences, Fallows claims, leaving them uninformed and cynical toward their government and bureaucratic officials, as well as the news media. He suggests making straight news stories more entertaining rather than filling space and air with entertainment.

Fallows believes that to be successful in their role as the eyes and ears of the public, the news media need to make audiences feel less like spectators and more like participants in public life and the news.