The Lifecycle of News Reporting

Whatever your opinion on the news is, good bad or everything in between, you can not deny how much of an impact the news has on our society. The ability to distribute information with such immediacy that is both compelling and relevant has been a major part in the growth of television. Every major network has their own news channel now aiming to capture the attention of millions of people worldwide. Because news media as a genre has become ingrained into our culture it is important to understand what it is, what it takes, and what does it mean when someone you know who works in film and television tells you they work in the news.

What is the News?

The news serves as a conduit between current events and the viewing public. Characterized by its immediacy and real-time reporting, the news genre on television is a diverse entity encompassing a range of formats, from traditional evening broadcasts to 24-hour news channels. It is fundamentally rooted in the principles of journalism, aiming to inform, educate, and engage viewers about local, national, and global events. The genre often adopts a structured format, presenting news stories with a blend of visuals, commentary, and expert analysis. The format is fairly simple and hasn’t changed much since its inception. You can practically surf every channel that has a news outlet and see how they all have the same format. Usually including some sort of host or hosts that gives general information. That host may defer to experts or someone who has more credibility in that topic such as a weatherman. You then might have people in the field who conduct interviews or give live information on something that is happening. This format transcends basically all avenues of news from sports to global affairs. In the end, it’s about giving their audience relevant information accurately as quickly as possible.

The Process

Much of news programming starts in a studio office where producers meet to get an idea of what is going to be newsworthy that day. They have to weigh their own biases against what the company would deem as newsworthy and pick a handful of stories that will be followable and relevant. Following that task, researchers, journalists, producers, and editors all work together to gather as much information on the stories as they are unfolding and then turn that information into scripts so their anchors and reporters can read them live while on-air. After or during scripting, the studio is set up with camera operators, lighting, anchors, and directors who begin to create a plan of how they are going to film their live broadcast which may only be minutes away at this time. This also includes the many people in the control room who have to operate things like sound mixing, camera switching, graphics, and heaps more. Once everything is set up or as close to set up as possible they start rolling on the anchors who will provide the news found earlier in a way that is digestible to the audience. While this is being recorded, editors are fact checking and putting relevant information blurbs and graphics on the screen to supplement the anchor. This recorded broadcast is then distributed within minutes to websites and television stations all across the globe.

The people making the news have this work down to a science; they are able to quickly take information as it is happening and get it recorded and sent to people's eyes within minutes of said news happening. All of this process may need to happen within a few hours to sometimes even a few minutes. They don’t call it breaking news because its slow. Immediacy is vital to the news industry and it does not look like that is going to change.

The Ethics

As more channels have appeared in the previous decades there have been more niche channels that cater to specific audiences. And when some of that specific audience prefer to hear information that has been censored or fits more into their world view. The problem comes when people of different world views come into contact with a channel that has information that seems to oppose some of their views. Tempers flare and all of the sudden you have people of all different types screaming about how one news outlet is fake or this outlet is too corporate.

Similar to documentaries, the people behind the news have to make an ethical decision every day. They have to pick stories that will cater to both their audience as well as the people signing their paychecks. Sometimes this means cherry picking information that may not give the full picture to validate their audiences world view. Many times this information can be just plain wrong and can cause problems in the audiences who trust their outlet. Since their audience now is believing blatantly wrong info. The producers for these news outlets have to walk a fine line between giving their audiences 100% correct information with no biases (which may be quite boring) and giving their audiences something that aligns with what they already believe and is entertaining but may not be 100% accurate.