In Stuart Scott’s ESPN the Mag column “Two Way,” this exchange takes place:
Question from Jerrod [Syracuse, N.Y.]: What do you think about the coverage given to a story like A-Rod and Madonna’s? Is this newsworthy? Why are we hearing about this?
Answer from Stuart Scott [ESPN]: Great question, complicated answer. Personally, I couldn’t care less about A-Rod and Madonna. People get divorced all the time. But for two days, this story was the most-talked-about item on ESPN.com. I played big on MSNBC, too. So even though I don’t think it’s a story, obviously a whole lot of people do. That makes it news.
Such an exchange leads me to ask, “What makes the news the news?”
Thus is the state of our public discourse.
I’ll give you the Journalism 101 acronym answer I had to teach as a GTA: TIP CUP (a “newsworthy” story is supposed to contain at least one of these elements):
Timeliness
Impact
Prominence (e.g., someone/something famous or well-known)
Conflict
Uniqueness
Proximity
That doesn’t really narrow it down much, eh?
A lot of old-school journalism professors will tell you that Conflict is where it’s at in making something newsworthy (even if you have to, *ahem*, exaggerate the conflict to make it interesting). I’m not a fan of this for news, btw. If the conflict is truly there, then report it, of course…but reporters are not supposed to be fiction writers.
I think TIP CUP is missing one very important factor, however: something that makes the news is often also whatever won’t really upset the advertisers.