ABSTRACT
If you ask a journalist to define news, the journalist may reply, “I know news when I see it.” If pressed, the journalist will probably list a set of conditions that make people or events more newsworthy: novelty or oddity; conflict or controversy; interest; importance, impact, or consequence; sensationalism; timeliness; or proximity (Shoemaker, Chang, and Brendlinger 1987). If pressed further, the journalist may become irritated or impatient, because for the journalist the assessment of newsworthiness is an operationalization based on the aforementioned conditions. In other words, the practitioner typically constructs a method for fulfilling the daily job requirements. He or she rarely has an underlying theoretical understanding of what defining something or someone as newsworthy entails. To be sure, individual journalists may engage in more abstract musings about their work, but the profession as a whole is content to apply these conditions and does not care that the theory behind the application is not widely understood. Hall (1981, 147) calls news a “slippery” concept, with journalists defining newsworthiness as those things that get into the news media.
