Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

News is a genre of mass media content resulting from journalists’ information gathering and editors’ decisions and following professional practices and norms (→ Ethics in Journalism ; News Routines ; Standards of News ). News is the product of teamwork in media outlets. According to functional-structural social theory, news content is information that seeks to meet social needs by observing the natural and human universe in order to help people survive in their physical and social world (→ Functional Analysis ). News is the product of mass media, which began with the printing press and later developed into → radio , → television , and the → Internet (→ Media History ; Newspaper ; Newspaper, History of ). The main critical question regarding news is whether there is a consensus on how news is defined and who creates and controls news production and news content. Is it the media proprietors, the government, interested sources, political and/or economic social and cultural elites, the hegemonic majority, public relations agencies, spokespersons of the business community, advertisers, journalists and/or editors, or the → audience and the → public (→ Advertising ; News Sources ; Ownership in the Media ; Public Relations )? Some theories and critics credit the end product of news to one or more of the related actors in defining, producing, and disseminating mass media ... log in or subscribe to read full text