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PART ONE: JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS
CHAPTER 1 The Nature of News
Overview
The twin themes of this chapter and this book are the rapidly changing technology and the
unchanging values and basic skills of journalism. Beginning in this chapter and continuing
throughout the book, we stress what the professionals stress: the central importance of
relevance, usefulness and interest. We also emphasize, as the professionals do, the
unchanging importance of accuracy, fairness and serving the needs of your audience. Figure
1.1 clarifies for students how the concepts of accuracy, fairness and lack of bias function
differently in news writing and in commentary.
Teaching Tips
This opening chapter will, for many students, be their first introduction to the world of
reporting and journalism. Because the chapter tackles big-picture issues, your instruction
so you should
Lecture Notes
I. INTRODUCTION
A. What is news, and what is journalism?
1. Supreme Court case study.
II. JOURNALISM AND THE NEWS
A. Journalism and news defined.
B. Principles of good journalism.
1. The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rose
journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self–
oposes 10 principles to achieve this goal:
1) First obligation is to the truth.
2) First loyalty is to citizens.
3) Essence is discipline of verification.
III. GETTING NEWS TODAY
A. Journalism is in transition.
1. Consumers increasingly get their news from social media and other secondary
news sources.
a. Benefits include instant communication, sharing, audience participation.
2. Content more important than medium: hard news, soft news, commentary.
3. Legacy media audience and income are flat or falling; Web-based media is
4. New players have led to new roles (curator and fact checker) for traditional
5. Facebook as a media force.
IV. ELEMENTS OF A GOOD NEWS STORY
A. Criteria: relevance, usefulness, interest.
B. Elements of a good news story:
7. Two new criteria since the birth of the online age:
V. CONVERGENCE IN JOURNALISM
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A. Defined: efforts to use different strengths of different media to reach broader
1. New demands on journalists skills and flexibility across platforms.
2. Public responses.
3. Journalism fundamentals are changing.
4.
B. How different media present the news.
1. Newspapers and magazines better at explaining.
2. Television speed and emotional power.
VI.THE ROLE OF JOURNALISM
B. Challenges to American journalism:
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3. And yet, some improvement: credibility has improved a little; local outlets tend to
C.
1. Report the news.
2. Monitor power.
VII. ACCURACY, FAIRNESS AND BIAS
A.
a. Hard to get the facts.
b. Hard to tell what they mean.
B. Accuracy getting every detail right.
C. Fairness not the same as accuracy.
1. Basketball referee analogy.
D. Bias.
1. Built into journalism.
a. Conflict, novelty, celebrity.
c. perception is not related to partisan politics.
VIII. THE ISSUE OF OBJECTIVITY
A. Objectivity the working credo of most American journalists seen as the essential,
B. Michael Schudson, in Discovering the News: objectivity arose in the post-WWI era
when journalists and scholars turned to science.
C. Fear of a phony objectivity (Kovach and Rosenstiel).
D. European model openly biased reporting.
IX. WHAT IS NOT NEWS
A. Opinion.
1. Example: Brian Williams on NBC vs. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC vs. Bill
Class Activities and Discussion Questions
Activity 1: Where do your students get their news? Ask students to break down their own
mainstream newspapers and magazines, alternative publications, original online reporting,
groups of three or four, and ask students to combine their results into an average. Have the
groups report their results and come up with some kind of class average. The trend is that
Activity 2: Create a Facebook group for the members of your class. Use the Facebook group
throughout the semester to post articles and commentaries
Activity 3: The authors note that hard news, analysis/explanatory writing, soft news/features
and commentary all were published in the aftermath of the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Put students into groups of four or five, and give each
group a copy of the same day s edition of The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Allow each group 15 to 20 minutes to find examples of each kind of writing/reporting; each
Activity 4: Assign students to one of 10 pairs or groups. Assign each group one of Kovach
means for contemporary journalists and justify its continued inclusion on the list. Have each
Activity 5: Bring in a few corrections from The New York Times or other newspapers. Hand
out copies to students, or project the items on a screen in the classroom. Ask students to
Activity 6: What do students read, watch and listen to first news stories or commentaries
weak commentaries? Discussion questions: Are information consumers more likely to rate as
a strengthening of the American democratic experiment?
Solutions to Textbook Exercises
1. The rise of social media has helped call into question the reliability of much of what
appears in the mainstream media at least according to critics. Reporters should certainly
2. The purpose of this exercise is to help students learn to appreciate the different approaches
used by different journalistic mediums. Students should be able to pick out the sometimes
unvarnished look at what s happening in the news media today, something journalism
students should consider carefully.
4. Asking students to dramatically change their news consumption habits, even for a week,
will no doubt be met with agonized moaning and groaning. But the value of changing
their news consumption habits is enormous
5. The newspapers, of course, have more more stories and usually more depth. It will be
interesting to see any evidence of agenda setting, especially evidence of the often-noted
tendency of the networks (and other newspapers) to follow The New York Times. On the
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6. Your journalism blog. The potential value of a blog by each of your students, at the
beginning and throughout the course, is substantial. This first entry is designed to allow
your students to introduce themselves to you and each other, but the ability to create a
Solutions to Workbook Exercises
1. Our goal, in the text s opening anecdote describing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in
the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, is to help students see the changing roles of journalism
as a result of the continuing and growing presence of social media sites like Facebook and
Twitter in the work of journalists. We also recognize the effects of the increasingly
2. This exercise requires students to think about the forces reshaping journalism. On the
positive side, technology has broadened opportunities for journalists to report and tell
stories, and it has created more opportunities for news consumers to find what they want
when they want it. On the other side, the uncertainties caused by economic change are
3. If the editors of the campus and community papers are applying the criteria for news
probably will be written and presented with different perspectives (and, often, different
language).
compare your perspective to theirs.
Students should discuss the differences in audience. Readers of the student publication
probably care little about local politics, tax rates or the condition of the public schools.
Readers of the community paper, who probably tend to be longtime residents, generally
4. Students probably will notice that many of the same topics are reported in print and on
television, but the reporting will be noticeably different. Pictures are essential to
television. Therefore, fires, accidents and festivals are more likely to be defined as
important news. City council meetings typically make dull video, no matter how
Students should also notice that, largely because of the central importance of the video
image, television and newspaper journalists apply the same criteria in quite different
ways. In both media, look for attempts to use the emotional impact of pictures, whether
for tragedy or farce. Look for the dramatization of conflict. Look for the emphasis on
t let your students overlook the elements of engagement and solutions. Are readers
and viewers offered opportunities to learn more on websites or to help in some way the
victims of natural or manmade disasters?
What are their sources? What are their criteria for choosing subjects? Students may have
some reactions that their elders could learn from in terms of how best to inform while
entertaining.
6. Students may observe that the biggest difference is the amount of material available
online compared with the amount available in a newspaper or a newscast. Your local
paper and stations will have their own websites, usually with links to other information.
7. a. Encourage your students to pay special attention to the differences in emphasis
between the local and national papers. Ask them whether they think the editors of local
b. USA Today looks for stories with national appeal. It publishes more and shorter stories
8. This exercise serves at least two purposes: First, it requires practical application of the
community in which they are living. Their story ideas will vary widely. What matters is
that students are able to justify their work in terms of the criteria for news value.
9. A. a. The police chief as Man of the Year, of course, involves mainly prominence, with
proximity a factor.
B. The story of the cancer-detection center has the greatest news value because of its
impact. The Man of the Year story is probably least significant.
10. a. The library sources should include newspaper and magazine articles on both the issues
and the speakers. The New York Times Index, Facts on File and the Congressional
b. The local newspaper is a good place to start. A spokesperson for the American Civil
Liberties Union is sure to raise constitutional questions. Check with experts from the
nearest medical school and law school. On the protesting side may be local employers
11. Follow the same procedures as in exercise 10.
12. In the real case from which this exercise is drawn, the decision was not to publish. The
publishing include the following: Names add credibility to a story. Circumstantial
evidence strongly suggests that the nurse is either being disciplined or being made a
13. The benefits of such an accuracy-checking program are the verification of both detail and
context before publication (as opposed to waiting for complaints after publication),
together with the protections that verified accuracy offers. There also is a public relations
14. Newspaper editorials are, of course, intended to express opinion, or bias. However, good
CHALLENGE EXERCISES
15. This exercise is intended to help students see the way media companies are using the
convergence model to help determine what kind of journalism they publish and broadcast.
16. This exercise could easily be assigned with exercise 15. The key here is for students to
appreciate that text, video/audio, the Web and mobile devices are all part of the
17. This exercise is also a companion to exercises 15 and 16. Again, your students are the