ABSTRACT
Television news programmes are characterised by a variety of structural attributes that are important because they determine the way the news is presented and also because they embody certain intuitive, “professional” assumptions on the part of news editors and producers about audience satisfaction with and learning from news programmes that can be empirically tested. Among these programme factors are the serial ordering of news items and the grouping and placement of news reports according to story category. As we see in this chapter, these physical features of programmes may have profound influences on the amount of information viewers learn from television news broadcasts.
