What Is News?

In academic circles of China, the most authoritative definition of new has been proposed by Lu Dingyi in 1943. He said that news is the record of the facts happened recently. Fan Changjiang also had a definition as news is the important facts that most people want to know know and should know. Professional Wang Zhong has adopted the idea of mass communication, defining that news is the spread of recently changed facts. What’s more professional Gan Xifen regards news as a special method to report the most important facts in order to influence public opinions.

In narrow sense, news just means information. It refers to simple and rapid report of some social values happened at home and abroad recently, such as dynamic news, comment news, social news, cultural and educational news, international news etc. The broad news mean all kinds of articles recording important matters and social phenomenon recently happened, including news, communications, reportage with news and culture characters.

News mean a kind of literary form which is usually being used by newspapers, station, television station, Internet in order to record society, transform information and reflect times. Information and communication are two kinds that are used most often. Information, also news in narrow; in general it means news, communication, reportage, feature article, comment etc. Information means that you will use a narrative mode, with simple and brief words to report the facts that recently happened, highly valued and people concerned most rapidly and in time. Communication means that you will use several methods of narration, description, lyrics, discussion etc, which is a kind of news structure about events or typical figures concretely and vividly. It is a kind of narration and has been widely used in newspapers, broadcast station and news service.

The following are four main characters about news,

1.                 Real content and accurate facts. Reality is the life of news and the coming of power. Facts as origin, it is also the basis for belief. Facts, mean real things, there is no information about the figure, time, place, and the whole process. Exactly it means every facts, including all the details should be accurate. If there is something wrong with the news, it will lower values of news, breaking faith to people, damaging the career belongs to the party and the people.

2.                 Fresh and valued content. The most important thing for news is new, with cognitive, enlightened and directive meaning. Only new news can attract readers’ attention, thus they want to learn about the news first. Being new, it will report new figures, new events and new experience to readers, with meaning and significance, it will give people wisdom. The opinion that you just pursue something strange like people bites dog, which cannot be adapted.

3.                 News should be rapid and timely, with timeliness. Speed is the value of news, if there is some delay about news, it will low the value of news. Timeliness mean that you have to report news timely with fresh content. You should be keen to new figure, new events, new situations, new problems, you should learn about it as soon as possible, reflecting them rapidly and in time.

4.                 It should be brief and to the point, with short length. Brevity is the main symbol that news different from other styles, which means that you write the news in a short and simple way, with centralized and refined words “in a few words, recording facts, raying essence, general and not abstract, simple and not oversight”.

This is Belinda Toland from DinoDirect. (http://www.dinodirect.com )