Making News: Social Media for Journalists
You need to understand the basic meaning of news acronym. The acronym news stands for Non-News, Significant News and Weather. Besides the above, news is defined by different writers and journalists of news category. In general, news are those events or happenings that are worthy of being noted and reported, on any medium such as print, radio, and television.
A person can write about a news story as he/she sees fit. There is no editorial control exercised by news editors on what they want to report and where they want to publish the news story. Generally, news are about events that have some significance in our daily lives. They also stimulate our interest to participate in the activities and events described. But unlike fiction, news does not have the power to affect the characters in the story; the readers are merely reacting to the happening in the news. So if readers find it unbelievable, it will be of no use to them.
The challenge of today’s media literacy lies in ensuring that readers are well informed and remain in a position to gauge information based on verification of facts and sources rather than emotions and intuition. This requires some amount of creativity and rigorous reasoning on the part of the author. It also requires you to do a bit of self-checking before publishing news stories to make sure you did not get a false information in your news story.
When readers encounter unusual events in the world at large, they want to know more about them and they tend to look for news stories that give details about them. As mentioned earlier, human interest is the fundamental core of news reporting. A man bites the dog, a man flies in the air, a person falls from a bridge. All these news stories grab the readers’ attention and urge them to learn more about the issues.
While working as a journalist, you are required to learn and understand the different ways in which your medium of work can help you in gathering facts. News features that make readers glued to their newspapers include breaking news, local news, international news and sports news. In addition to this, news features that make readers curious about the particular issue in hand helps the journalist in finding stories that he/she can include in their next report. Such features make journalism an interesting profession.
Although all journalists try to ensure that what they publish regarding any particular topic is true, there is no way to totally remove all the false information from the internet. You have to learn to filter and delete false information coming from different quarters. This is one of the challenges faced by journalists who are keen on using social media for journalism. This is also one of the reasons why many online businesses have started blogging.