Category Archives: News gathering

What is news?

by Terri Reddout

Before we can start talking and writing news we need to know what news is.  Generally, a picture of the family cat is NOT news.  Unless the family cat kept mewing and clawing at the neighbor’s door and that woke them up so they got out of the house before it burned down to the ground.  Now your family cat IS newsworthy!

There really isn’t a magic formula for determining what news is.  I wish!  If there were, I’d bottle it up, sell it for a hefty price and retire someplace where temperatures are in the low 80s and bare-chested men bring me drinks with little umbrellas in them all day long.  (I can dream, can’t I?)

Which stories should we cover? What story leads the newscast?  What story goes above the fold?  Which story goes below the fold or on page 3? Do we commit a reporter and a photographers to this story?  Or do we commit the entire news team?

These are all tough questions, with a lot of variables you must factor in.  But… there are some guidelines to help us determine what is NOT newsworthy, what is newsworthy, and just how newsworthy a story is.  You’ll find various versions of these guidelines around the business, but they are generally combinations or more precise  divisions of these seven qualities or factors.

I call them T-P-P-I-C-H-U
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Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true

Written by Terri Reddout

Where were you on 9-11?

Chances are you were toddlers or younger.  Heck!  Some of you might not have been born yet.

I was in my Weber State University office working. My friend called and wanted to know if I started recording the news.  When I asked why, she told me to get in front of a television set, now!  I did. That’s when I saw the replay of the second plane crashing into the second tower.

The next 36 hours were filled with my news students gathering stories and putting together a newscast focused on how the terrorist attack impacted the university, the community and its people.

At the end of the day on 9-12, a student called me over to the computer and said, “Terri, you’ve got to look at this.”  Here’s what the email he opened looked like.

Screen shot 2015-03-04 at 1.08.36 AM

Continue reading Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true