ABSTRACT

The first thing that you might like to notice from the title of this topic is the emphasis it places on ‘news’ as an industrial process. We are being taken straight to the sharp end of the news process and being invited to consider not only how news is produced but also how it is ‘manufactured’. This last word is not one that would please many journalists. Manufacture carries with it the connotations of something which is being made or created, fabricated even. Of course, most journalists would argue that news is in fact about ‘truth’. Manufacture here is perhaps better seen as the idea of raw materials being refined into a finished product. In the case of news, these raw materials are events in the outside world which the production process of news gathering and presentation turns into a finished article in the form of a news bulletin, newspaper or online news information service.