Hat tip to Qui Diaz for pointing me to Scott Ward’s notion of “things that blow up” vs things that fall into the category of “everything else” in defining what it is that actually makes news.
Great graphic, by the way!
It’s actually not a bad way to explain “what makes news” to clients. I once tried using the standard journalism explanation that I learned way back in “News Gathering 101” at SDSU, below, watching the eyes of the client I was trying to explain this to just glaze over as I spoke:
The first definition of what makes news, adapted from something I snatched from somewhere online and my own insight of years in the news biz, basically corresponds to Scott Ward’s “things that blow up”:
NEWS EVENTS that are naturally occurring, such as Hurricane Wilma or the ValueJet crash;
Most people “get” this. It’s the other two categories of news that fall into the “red area of the pie chart — “everything else” – that defies the understanding of clients. And, I’ve got to say it, public relations degree holders that have never been part of the process of looking at possible news and deciding what makes the news hole and what doesn’t on any given day. They are:
ENTERPRISE NEWS, so-called because enterprising journalists take the initiative to dig it up or seek it out; and,
CREATED NEWS that occurs because a person or group does something public and newsworthy and/or seeks press attention.
These latter two areas, the “everything else” of what makes news, is where media relations specialists come in – helping an enterprising journalist who’s working on a longer-term story or feature with leads and sources that can add to the newsworthiness of the story; and, being creative in helping their client organizations to come up with something – a “news hook” – that helps get their message out to the public through the media because it is newsworthy and deserving of attention.
More on this and the eight generally accepted factors that help determine a story’s newsworthiness upcoming in Part II of this post.
What Makes News? Part II: ‘Everything else’ & elements of newsworthiness
What Makes News? Part III: Resonance in the era of Web 2.0
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