Imagine you're making a recipe that calls for a "wuzzaloup;" a food you've never encountered before. Even if the cookbook provides instructions for how to choose a perfect wuzzaloup, you may still have a challenge locating one if you don’t know what a wuzzaloup looks like or whether it can be found at a conventional grocery store, an international market, or foraged in redwood forests.
Similarly, equipping yourself with strategies for selecting the best news sources won’t be too helpful if you can’t recognize news from other types of media.
So, what is “news”?
We asked faculty from the Department of Journalism at Penn State this question. Watch the video below to see how they responded.
News needs to be based on facts, but being factual isn’t enough to qualify as news. For example, it might be a fact that you ate cereal for breakfast, but “You Ate Cereal for Breakfast” is not newsworthy. Why?
News is information, but not just any information. According to the News Literacy Project, in addition to being based on verifiable facts, news is defined by four characteristics: timely, important, unique, and interesting.
What is “interesting” to one person might be boring or irrelevant to someone else, so when journalists decide if something fits the criteria, they have a specific audience in mind. The audience is made of the people that are going to consume the news through reading, watching or listening.