Dennis & Defleur Chapter 9

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Understanding Media in
the Digital Age, 1/e
Everette E. Dennis
Melvin L. DeFleur
Prepared by Todd
Chambers, Ph.D.
Texas Tech
University
Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

NEWS, JOURNALISM, AND
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Chapter 9

News: The Information Function of
the Press
News is current or fresh knowledge about an event
or subject that is gathered, processed, and
disseminated via a medium to a significant
number of interested people

the Press
 News Process
 gathering relevant facts
 preparing them into newsworthy stories
 transmitting those stories via a mass medium
 audience attends to and comprehends what has
been presented

the Press
 Categories for Surveillance
 Territories, topics, and organizations
 local
 regional
 national
 international

the Press
 Time as a category
 Spot news: immediacy, no history
 Developing news: over time, occur in stages
 Continuing news: no clear beginning or end

News: The Information
Function of the Press
 Hard v. Soft News
 Hard news: what we know as ‘news’: crime,
politics, economy…
 Soft news: human interest: lifestyles, pop
culture, arts

the Press
 How Facts Become Distorted
 Direct observation
 Reports of witnesses
 Experts
 News releases
 Public records

Question to think about
 In your opinion, what are the major
differences between a Internet web
site and a newspaper?
 Why?

Encoding Strategies: Packaging the
News
 Traditional News Values
       Impact
       Timeliness
       Prominence
       Proximity
       The Bizarre
       Conflict
       Currency

Encoding Strategies: Packaging the
News
 Story Formats
 Tradition: Who did
What, Where, When
and Why?
 Inverted Pyramid
 important ideas lead
 Story Formats
 For radio and
television
 Word story
 VO
 Stand-up
 Package

Journalistic Styles
 Sensational or Tabloid Journalism
 1890s – 1920s (remember Hearst & Pulitizer)
 Objective or Impartial Journalism
 separate fact from opinion
 present emotionally detached view of news
 strive for fairness and balance
 Critical, Interpretative Journalism
 providing analysis about news

Journalistic Styles
 Literary or “New” Journalism
 1960s and 1970s
 scene setting
 extended dialogue
 point of view
 interior monologue
 composite character

Journalistic Styles
 Advocacy Journalism
 point of view
 magazine, cable, radio, websites
 Bill O’Reilly, Lou Dobbs
 Precision Journalism
 computer assisted reporting
 uses tools of social science to analyze the news

Journalistic Styles
 Citizen Journalism, Blogging, and
Demonstration of News
 Using technology to empower “backpack
journalists”
 iPhone and other smart phones
 Hudson River plane crash/landing, 2009
 Satirical or Humor Journalism
 Fake News
 Comedy Central, The Daily Show

Social and Cultural Influences on
the News
 The Social Organization of the Newsroom
       Ownership
       Managers
       Editors
       News Producers (writers, reporters, wires)
       Gatekeeping – all levels

Consequences of the Profit Motive
 Audience or Profit?
 audiences and advertisers
 Infotainment
 Trivialization
 high costs of news

Social and Cultural Functions of the
News
 The Market Approach: News as a
Product
 News as a commodity
 Using marketing to deliver the news
 Critics: pandering to “market research” and
not “journalism”

News
 The Adversarial Approach: Watchdogs of
the Public Interest
 Traditional Investigative Reporting
 James Gordon Bennett, New York Herald (1840s)
 “Nelly Bly”: reporting about insane asylum in
New York
 1970s: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,
Watergate
 1990s: Drudge Report, Bill Clinton

News
 The Agenda-Setting Function of the News
Media
 which stories lead
 prominence
 McCombs & Shaw’s Agenda Setting Function of
the Mass Media
 Press tell us what to think about

Dennis & Defleur Chapter 9

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