Hard News Is Action, an Event, an Identifiable Occurrence
Hard news relates the details of a specific occurrence that is the occasion for a news report, the “peg” on which the news story is hung. An event is concrete and discrete; ordinarily it can be explained clearly in a limited time or space. A single event is more likely to be intelligible and to be a novel, dramatic Tag Heuer Replica Watches event involving specific individuals. Many events can be photographed or taped, an important consideration for both print and television journalism. This norm, like the emphasis on individuals, works against coverage of processes or ideas.
Although hard news is believed to involve fast-breaking, unforeseen events, news organizations typically cover events that can be scheduled in advance, so reporters and camera crews can be present and record them. As a result, news people tend to cover news conferences and briefings, speeches, announcements, ceremonies, and other scheduled events. This is one reason that pseudo-events (events staged just for media coverage) and what are called “photo opportunities” are effective ways to manipulate news coverage.10 The problem of needing to know in advance about the unexpected explains why reporters are tempted to ask participants to re-create what happened when faced with a situation like a riot.
In his study of a California newspaper, Mark Fishman found that journalistic concepts of newsworthy events coincided with what he called “bureaucratic phase structures,” the ways various bureaucracies punctuate processes in order to divide them into stages–for example, arrests, indictments, verdicts, and sentencing’s in crime news. He found that journalists depended on such definitions for the meaning and relevance of what they observed, for determining which events were newsworthy, which accounts were suspicious or reliable, what was controversial, and what constituted the sides and terms of a controversy.11 These were the bases on which journalists decided what counted as an event.
Hard news is the story of an act or an occurrence. This single, isolated event is simpler to communicate and easier to understand than Cartier Replica a process or an idea. It is likely to be dramatic and novel and to involve individuals. The emphasis on events, however, reveals a contradiction at the heart of newsgathering: the desire to cover events as they happen and the need to cover events that are scheduled in advance.
As coverage of homelessness illustrates, tying news stories to a specific event limits, even prevents, the treatment of processes, structures, patterns, and systems.
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