Newsworthiness

Last week I have written more short stories than I have in my whole life.  I was able to write for the website and gain new insight on what makes stories “newsworthy”.  I think everyone has that feeling in them when they see a headline and it peaks their interest.  But everyone is very different and so the real question is how do you know what a majority of people will like?  That takes people who have been in the news business for a long time to decipher what and why a certain story trumps another.  I was able to see a glimpse of that this last week.  The invention of the web really helps to know which direction to point for news.  Every morning there is a news meeting allocating reporters to certain stories and such.  The website is a good balance of news.  They have many stories about many different topics.  While we sit in the news meeting, we always ask the “web people” what’s popular at the time.  They can give valuable insight to what people are interested in that day.  Although the website is important, the news desk has to be very discerning in what type of news we cover.  Every station goes a different direction according to whatever the news director deems important.  So, it’s not an easy job finding the most important stories on a day-to-day basis.  That’s why it takes a talented person (or group) to achieve this.  That’s what I was able to learn last week because it is so crucial to have important news feeding out to the public.  You have to get an idea of what story topics are “hitting” and what stories are getting old.  For instance, it seems like there has been many kidnappings and missing persons lately so sometimes it feels like maybe we should go in the other direction because it’s not a prevalent topic now.  And that’s just ONE decision needing to be made throughout the whole day.  Point in case, it takes a lot of talent to be in this business because this is just one little detail about the job of a news-person.