Week 3

Lectures and Readings:

This week we analysed how information is gathered and turned into stories. The art of consuming news is not only to just consume it, but to analyse its news values. Some news may be needed to just fill in a segment, but for television, news needs to be valuable to a viewer and grab their attention.

One way to identify if news is a priority for the daily agenda is to weigh it up against the news values. It depends on the type of program and audience too, because they can affect the priority of a story (Alysen 2012, p. 25). For example, a local bulletin in Australia would not contain a news story about the American Government, unless it directly affected locals.

I believe the most effective news value is proximity. In terms of interest in a news story, audiences tend to be more concerned about bad news or good news if it directly affects them.

Therefore, the news values control the news of the day. This also controls the way bulletins are prepared and the way stories are constructed. In print stories are written in a pyramid fashion with the most important information beginning at the top and the least important information at the bottom.

However, broadcast is a little different to this. In broadcast scripts there are segments of sound written in the program and the story has to start with a strong lead, hold the viewer’s attention in the middle and end with a strong conclusion (alysen 2012, p. 99). This is a little different to the written technique, because readers can get all the information in the first few paragraphs of a news piece, whereas in broadcast they need to generally keep their attention on the story to get all of the details (Alysen 2012, p. 43).