News:
It’s what happened today (or happened earlier and was just discovered today).
The information was obtained from reliable, appropriate sources (interviews, research, etc.).
It has been verified via journalistic standards for accuracy and fairness before it is reported or shared.
Framing the news (we talk about this more when we get to fairness):
It meets one or more of the following requirements:
Interesting
Relevant
Useful
Impactful
Timely
Informative
Entertaining
Meaningful
It is your job to recognize which of the new requirements is the most important and emphasize it.
Who decides this:
Especially in the case of news, human curation—editors curating content and using journalistic judgment around what’s trustworthy or timely—needs to complement algorithms that provide personalization and relevance.
Source
So not just readers but not just editors, either.
Especially nowadays, locality is big. Local news is suffering.
Spotlight on Research: Source: Researchers from the News Measures Research Project at Duke analyzed more than 16,000 news stories across 100 U.S. communities with populations ranging from 20,000 to 300,000 people.
— Only about 17 percent of the news stories provided to a community are truly local — that is actually about or having taken place within — the municipality.
— Less than half (43 percent) of the news stories provided to a community by local media outlets are original (i.e., are produced by the local media outlet).
COM252: Writing for the Mass Media 