Blackwell Reference Online

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A news story is the standard format that journalists employ for producing the texts they publish in the media. In contrast to feature narratives or subjective reviews and editorials, the news story aims to give a direct, succinct, and fact-based account (→  Objectivity in Reporting ), but instead the news story does political work and gives orientation in a complex world ( Schudson 1982 ). This difference causes problems not only for storytellers but also for news researchers. The news story is an invention that responded to commercial necessities. When news wire services emerged around the middle of the nineteenth century, they needed to sell the same stories to newspapers with competing party alignments (→  News Agencies ). Neutral and brief factual stories were less likely to offend partisan sensibilities. The first news stories of this sort probably appeared from the New York Associated Press, forerunner of the Associated Press (AP), which served both Republican- and Democrat-leaning newspapers. Since then news agencies such as Reuters and Agence France-Presse have influenced practices for news story writing (→  Standards of News ). Many newspapers or agencies have their own stylebooks that guide the practice of news writing, including the best-known AP Stylebook (updated annually by the AP). Journalists consider themselves news people . Interviewing, note taking, and research ... log in or subscribe to read full text