The Power Elite – Journalists Influence News Stories
The Power Elite – Journalists Influence News Stories
News papers have a very limited shelf life, sometimes as short as a single day. It’s like a hot baked cake coming right out of the oven. It might be news, but it can’t be much more than that. It can be anything, but usually not news.
The first requirement is that it has to be completely written to give the readers some kind of fresh information. It has to offer some new perspective on current affairs, or on anything that the general public may be unaware of. The second requirement is that the news item should be written in such a way that it offers some kind of guidance to the reader in some constructive way. Thirdly, the news items should be well presented and should have an overall coherence, a structure. A common feature with most newspapers and other media, is their ‘style’, which is nothing more than a set pattern, which the news organisations follow.
The fourth requirement that all news selection has to fulfill is to offer some kind of information that is more important to a particular group of people. In other words, if the aim is for all news to be of general interest, then no-one will read it. There have been many occasions where newspapers have run stories about child abuse, or suicide. But what is the general public interested in, if such information is not of any interest to them? So the very purpose of publishing news selections, is to ensure that the reader knows something more about a particular aspect of public life.
So how do news organisations go about fulfilling these requirements? They use several different strategies, one of which is known as the news value judgment strategy. This is basically a model of journalism, which attempts to measure the importance of different pieces of published output against other published outputs. This model is based upon the work of the famous American sociologist, economists and psychologists called the relay system.
The relay system is used by many top news organisations to judge the extent to which they are socially relevant. For instance, newspapers publish a list of the top ten most social media stories of the day, together with the top 10 most important business stories. In doing so, they make a note of the connections between the two lists. They can then look for mentions of key terms such as social media, social networking, social media marketing etc. and categorise the piece accordingly.
This information provides an opportunity for journalists to establish the relationship between certain events and certain key terms, as well as establishing the extent to which these events have changed the world. This form of storytelling, called news storytelling, is of great power and influence in modern society. It can provide critical analysis and insights, in addition to providing entertaining entertainment. So the main point here is the power of the news story, and the influence of journalists on the news.