Below is an element-by-element overview of the entire "What is News?" lesson. To the left of longer elements, you will find short summaries of those elements. In each assessment element, a yellow highlight indicates a correct answer. Whenever relevant, we also include teacher tipsđź’ˇand definitions of important words from NLP's word wall đź’¬*.*
What is News? - Get Started
Journalists have to make difficult decisions like deciding what should be reported on to the public since they cannot cover everything.
"Hi, I’m Paul Saltzman and I’m assistant managing editor for projects and Sunday editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. In lesson one, you saw how challenging it can be to sort through the vast amount of information you encounter every day as a news consumer. Now, imagine that you’re a journalist: Your job is to decide — out of everything that happens on a given day — what should be reported to the public. In other words, what counts as “news” that day. And, no, you can’t just cover everything. You have a limited number of people, and there’s only so much time, and space to report the news. Besides, even if you could pursue every single thing that happens everywhere, you really wouldn’t want to, because a lot of what happens every day wouldn’t be newsworthy to most people. Still, enough big things do happen to make choosing among them challenging. So how would you choose which stories to cover? Which events or issues would make the cut and get valuable space on your website or in your newspaper or precious time during your TV or YouTube newscast? In other words, how would you decide which stories are newsworthy? Here’s your chance to test your own news judgment and to get a sense of the kind of difficult decisions journalists make every day."
Judging Newsworthiness
What Is Newsworthy? Review the following pairs of news stories — and choose the one from each pair that you think is more newsworthy by clicking on it. After making your selection, you'll be asked to briefly explain your choice.
Don't worry. There's no absolute right or wrong answer. Once you make your selection, Paul will explain which one he would have chosen and why, so you can better understand how a veteran journalist might make the same decision. Please note that in this activity, your selections are final and cannot be changed.