What makes News?

[Trevor]

I haven't had cable for about a year now, and I try to watch my local news from only one channel on the internet, or read about it in my local newspaper. Usually if there's anything I've missed I can hear about it from a friend, sometime during the week.
My question is: What makes News?
I am asking this because a lot of things are newsworthy and a lot of things aren't. What makes something more or less newsworthy?

[Michael]

The more negative it is the more newsworthy it is, ask any editor

[Gelatinous Pope]

Jesus makes news. The newspaper is all just part of God's plan, man.

[Flux]

I think that what makes news is very much dependent on the specific news source, and what country the news source is in. There's privatized and sensationalized news like in the U.S., censured news like in China, and everything in between.

Actually, for a class on Japanese politics and society, I need to read daily the websites of several prominent Japanese papers (English translation of, as I do not speak Japanese), and was impressed by how different the stories were from the U.S. news I'm used to (although I don't read a great deal of that either). Topics are more pertinent, and there is less emphasis on bizzare but irrelevant little stories.

But I'd have to agree that negative things often make news more than the positive, though some papers don't overdo it so badly as others.

[dfift]

What makes news is surely just a matter of personal interest? What's news to me isn't necessarily news to you. Personally I rarely watch or read any general news.

[lolipop]

Like time and space, news is relative. What one person believes is newsworthy may not be news to another. In the broadest sense, news is any event that pops out more than the others, and since we all have different opinons, some things may pop out more than others.

Take the child watching a plant grow, for example. When they start to see a bud come up from the dirt, they are surprised and excited, because they find it miraculous, no matter how many times they have seen it. In a larger perspective, anything an adult sees, such as a tornado or a fire, is nothing short of monumental. Unfortunately, because of all the macarbe things we see on the TV these days, we have become desensitized to the small, positive things that should matter. That is mostly why we seem to be having more bad news than good. I might have gone overboard on my explanation, but at least you might be able to understand better.:)