INGREDIENTS OF NEWS

DISCLAIMER: The notes given below are the compilation of information from various sources based on the topics that were discussed in the ‘Introduction to Journalism’ class. These notes are being compiled to help the students of Journalism enhance their knowledge.

DEPARTMENT: B.A. (Hons) Journalism

SEMESTER: I

PAPER: INTRODUCTION TO JOURNALISM

UNIT:I

TOPIC: INGREDIENTS OF NEWS

TIME PERIOD: This topic was discussed in the first week of August, 2025

Ingredients of News

At its core, news is the reporting of carefully selected events to a target audience, as multiple events occur around the globe, yet only a select few make it into the daily news circulation. This selection process isn't arbitrary - it follows established patterns that media scholars have studied extensively. Understanding these "ingredients" or news values reveals not just what makes something newsworthy, but also exposes the inherent biases and limitations in how we consume information.

The Core News Values

I. Relevance and Proximity

News relevance operates on multiple levels - geographical, cultural, and economic. Research by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in their seminal agenda-setting studies demonstrates that audiences pay more attention to news that directly affects their lives. However, this creates what I observe as a "relevance bubble" - where important global issues are ignored simply because they seem distant. For instance, climate change effects in small island nations rarely make headlines in developed countries, despite their global implications.

II. Timeliness in the Digital Era

The concept of timeliness has dramatically evolved. While traditional journalism valued breaking news, social media has created an expectation of instant reporting. This creates a dangerous tension: the pressure for immediate publication often conflicts with thorough verification. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing coverage exemplified this - Reddit users and news outlets alike spread misinformation in their rush to be first, highlighting how the modern obsession with timeliness can undermine accuracy.

III. Simplification and Clear Communication

News needs to be easy to understand, but this can sometimes create problems. When reporters try to make complex stories simple, they might leave out important details or make things seem more black-and-white than they really are.

For example, when scientists discover something new about health or climate change, the research is usually complicated with many "ifs" and "buts." But news reports often present these findings as simple facts or complete opposites of what we thought before.

During COVID-19, we saw this happen a lot. When doctors and scientists learned new things about the virus and changed their recommendations, news reports sometimes made it look like experts were "changing their minds" or "flip-flopping" instead of explaining that this is how science normally works - we learn new things and update our understanding.

IV. Unexpectedness and the "Man Bites Dog" Phenomenon

The journalism axiom "dog bites man isn't news, but man bites dog is" reveals our media's bias toward the unusual. While this captures attention, it can create distorted worldviews. Research by George Gerbner on "cultivation theory" shows that heavy news consumption can lead to overestimating the frequency of rare, violent events while underestimating common but less dramatic issues like infrastructure decay or educational challenges.

V. Narrative Arc and Audience Engagement

Modern news often tells stories like movies or TV shows, with good guys, bad guys, and exciting plot twists. This makes news more interesting to watch or read, but it can also make real-life issues seem simpler than they actually are.

For example, when covering politics, news reports often focus on "who's winning" and "who's losing" instead of explaining what the politicians actually want to do and how it would affect people's lives. It becomes like sports commentary - exciting to follow, but you might miss the important details about policies that could change your daily life.

VI. Editorial Balance and the Diversity Dilemma

News organisations strive for varied content, but "balance" often means false equivalency. Climate change coverage that gives equal time to scientific consensus and fringe denial doesn't reflect factual balance - it creates confusion. This reveals a fundamental challenge: how do we maintain diverse perspectives while avoiding the trap of treating all opinions as equally valid?

VII. Conflict as Entertainment

Conflict drives engagement, but constant exposure to adversarial framing may contribute to societal polarization. Studies by Amber Boydstun and others show that conflict-focused news coverage can increase political animosity and decrease civic engagement. The question becomes: are we informing citizens or inadvertently encouraging division?

VIII. Celebrity Culture and the Prominence Problem

The emphasis on prominent figures reflects and reinforces existing power structures. When celebrity scandals receive more coverage than policy debates, we must ask: What does this say about our democratic priorities? This prominence bias also extends geographically—Western media's focus on developed nations creates what some scholars call "news imperialism."

IX. Innovation vs. Novelty

There's an important distinction between genuine innovation in journalism and mere novelty-seeking. While new storytelling techniques and platforms can enhance understanding, the pursuit of "viral" content can compromise journalistic integrity. The rise of TikTok journalism illustrates this tension: can complex issues be meaningfully addressed in 60-second videos?

X. Audience Impact and the Feedback Loop

Perhaps most critically, these news values create a self-reinforcing cycle. Audiences shaped by these selection criteria expect more of the same, making it difficult for news organisations to break free from these patterns. This raises fundamental questions about journalism's role: should it give people what they want or what they need?

XI. The Verification Challenge in the Digital Age

The digital era has made verification both more important and more challenging. With deepfakes, bot networks, and sophisticated misinformation campaigns, the traditional methods of source verification are no longer sufficient. News organisations now need digital forensics expertise alongside traditional investigative skills.

Critical Reflections

These ingredients of news, while useful for understanding media selection, also reveal troubling patterns. They prioritise the dramatic over the important, the simple over the complex, and the familiar over the foreign. As future journalists, we must grapple with these limitations while working within existing systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique lens through which to examine these news values in action. Early coverage focused heavily on dramatic death tolls and political conflicts (playing to unexpectedness and conflict values) while often inadequately explaining complex public health concepts. This pattern suggests that our current news value system may be inadequate for covering the complex, long-term challenges of the 21st century.

What eventually becomes news reflects not just objective importance, but the intersection of commercial pressures, audience expectations, and these deeply embedded values. Understanding this system is the first step toward potentially transforming it. The question for our generation of journalists is whether we can evolve these traditional news values to better serve a democratic society in an increasingly complex world.

Time Period: The mentioned topic was discussed in class in the first week of December, 2022. 

News is an account of human activity, which seeks to interest, inform, or educate the readers but it is a pain-staking task to create, organize, write and re-create news material making it worthy of interest for the audience. A news item becomes worthy not just because of its formatting and exposure but also because of the elements which form its part. We may call them “ingredients of news”

1. Immediacy

Immediacy or timeliness is an important requisite of news. A reporter usually places emphasis on the latest angles of an event. The words ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ are related in most of the news stories. Occasionally a story may concern events that happened in the past. In this case, the reporter discusses some present aspects of a past event.

We are well acquainted with the term “breaking news”, which highlights the immediacy aspect of news. 

2. Proximity

Proximity or nearness refers to geographic nearness. Normally a reader is more interested in an event geographically nearer than the one which has taken place in some remote part of the world

3. Consequences

A reporter should emphasize the angle of a story that will interest most readers, listeners or viewers in terms of consequences.

4. Prominence

Prominence means persons, places, things and situations known to the public for their weather, social position, achievement or previous publicity. The reporter should always add as many prominent names and places in news stories as possible. The more renowned a particular name, place, event or situation, the more interest the news will create among its readers.

5. Drama

It also promotes the value of a news story. A reporter tries to find a picturesque background and dramatic action for his news.

(This particular aspect has been facing a lot of backlashes and criticisms in the present times as the quality has gone downhill with extremely loud subjects and unnecessary vulgarity. What our critics and audience believe is that some sprinkle of masala here and there is fine and even important, but extreme chaotic news, obscene ness and violation of people's privacy is where they draw the line)

6. Oddity

Oddity or queerness always helps to make facts interesting. The greater the degree of oddity in a story, the greater is its value as news.

7. Conflict

It is one of the most important news elements. It is inherent in nearly all news of sports, war, crime, violence and internal disputes and in all stories involving difference of opinion. Generally, the news of conflict also involves other news values such as drama and oddity and therefore, has an emotional impact, a factor that appeals to many people. Many types of stories have conflict as their underlying element: the struggle against odd. As a wise man once said, “Conflict is the adrenaline of news”

8. Suspense

People need a reason to keep reading.  The news shall be able to keep their own edges all the time so that they are fully alarmed when they hear a new piece of info and eager to look into it.

9. Emotion

Anything that deals with people's experiences and conveys real emotion will help them to connect with your message, but this should be done appropriately and with authenticity.  It doesn't have to be a tear-jerker of a story, nor does it need to be designed to keep your audience in stitches - sometimes it helps to just be a little bit more human in your communications.

10. Extremes/superlatives

Reporters and audiences might be interested in the first, the best, the longest, the smallest, the highest – if the media can legitimately claim one.

11. Scandal

Reporters want a scoop on the scandal – everyone wants to hear all the details whenever there is moral or legal misconduct.

12. The Bizarre

Anything with shock value seems like a click bait and we keep on clicking and clicking.

13. Celebrity

Whenever something happens to someone important or semi-famous, we tend to care more about it because we have been watching these people growing up and unknowingly a connection develops, and with that a deeper interest in their lives.

14. Impact

Impact poses a question: How will it affect the readers? A reporter emphasizes the angle of the story that interests more readers, listeners or viewers in terms of impact. The number of people affected by an event influences the story’s newsworthiness.

Example: A rise in income tax may, at first sight, seem the basis of a dull and depressing article but it has an impact because it would affect most people’s pockets. 

‘The more people involved in an event, the stronger the story, the more impactful it is’.

History never actually repeats, but it does seem to repeat tendencies. Similarly, news stories never duplicate each other, but they do have a way of falling into definite categories. Analyzing them as we read them from day to day or listen to them as they come over through different sources of news like radio, TV or newspaper, we can easily distinguish elements of news interest which recur constantly. Given above are some of the most important elements, which make NEWS. However, there are always occasions when we find new situations arising and taking place as eminent news stories in media all over the world.

(This is compiled by a team of 3 students from the batch of 2026. This is published under the Media Research Cell, established by Dr. Vartika Nanda in the year 2020.)