Problematizing the concept of news

1. Problematizing the concept of
NEWS
By Ahmed Al-haddad and Kenan Prendergast

2. The purpose
The news media focuses on delivering news to
the general public or a target public audience.
This includes print media (newspapers,
newsmagazines), broadcast news (radio and
television), and more recently the Internet
(online newspapers news blogs etc.).

3. News Values
Hard News – Seen to many as serious news which most of the time involves the whole
world. This involves politics, foreign affairs, human-interest stories, etc.
Soft News – Seen to many as news that does not deal with serious topics or events.
Proximity – The nearness in time and space. For example stories about events and
situations in one’s local area is going to be more trustworthy than the events that
place far away.
Impact – Will it affect people?
Timeliness – Recent events have a much higher news values than earlier happenings.
For example Timeliness means a particular value such as stories being brought to the
public ahead of competition. This is known as “scoops”.

4. Within a typical week one of the most important
news sources for the UK citizens is television
(mentioned first by 55%, newspapers (19%),
radio (12%), and the Internet (8%).
Whereas in America, men are most likely to
choose the Internet as their most important
news source, 11 percent compared to 5 percent
of women.

5. NEWS
PROXIMITY
TIMELINESS
ENTERTAINING
HUMAN
INTEREST
UNUSUALNESS/SU
RPRISE
BAD NEWS
CONFLICT/TRAGEDEY
IMPACT

6. The most trusted news sources in the UK is BBC
NEWS (mentioned by 32%), ITV News (8%), Sky
NEWS (7%), the Daily Mail (3%), the BBC News
website (3%), BBC Radio (with the World Service
and national radio each receiving 2%), the Times
(2%), the Daily Telegraph (2%), the Guardian
(1%) and finally Google (1%).

7. UK citizens are surprisingly similar to those in
American regarding to many of their current
attitudes to the media. In American they are
much less likely than the citizen in other parts of
the world to think that the media reports all
sides of a story, with 64 percent disagreeing that
the media achieves this. Finally, leaving the 43
percent disagreeing that the media reports news
accurately.