May 25, 2007, Newsletter Issue #243: News Media Landscape

Tip of the Week

The “news media" isn´t the monolith it´s often presented to be. Different types of media have different purposes, editorial perspectives and needs. In addition, there are many factors, including personality and individual experiences and tastes that impact how a particular news director, editor or reviewer will respond to your information. However, they all have one thing in common: They have to make intelligent news judgments.
Newspapers, radio stations and TV newsrooms are inundated with an avalanche of information each day that they must sift through to choose the few items that fit their format, deadlines and available space or airtime. This includes what is viewed as "legitimate" news like disasters, politics and other dramatic events that represent the backbone of the news coverage and influence what´s left for everything else. News people must have a way to separate the important from the trivial, the compelling from the ho-hum. They need to identify the dramatic, unusual, innovative, or inspiring story that makes people sit up and pay attention. Hence the basic journalistic axiom, "So what? Who cares?" In other words, it needs to be meaningful and important to a lot of people to justify the time and the space it takes to tell about it. If you can´t show how your story rises to this level of newsworthiness, it will be difficult to get it told.

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