Perhaps the best way to test the news value of a particular story is to paraphrase an ancient question: What makes a person, event, product, idea, or organization different from all others? Information without distinction is data, not news.

“News,” in the most basic sense, is simply information you didn’t have before. When you first hear the local football team is ahead 21 to six in the third quarter or that your favorite hardware store was robbed, that’s news.

New News Versus Old News

But if it’s true that “news” is fresh information, it’s also true that some news is both known and aged. On New Year’s Day, you can find any number of “year in review” reports telling you things you already know. Weekly and monthly magazines routinely recount “old” news, albeit with information and perspectives that may not have been available at the time of the event. Reporters rewrite old information and create background pieces so breaking news (new news?) can be seen in perspective. A given event can produce ten different stories, each with a different spin oriented toward a specific audience. Commentators take old information, add their opinions, and create columns and editorials. These commentaries, in turn, may themselves evolve into news by raising new ideas and perspectives. On the Internet, everything that isn’t old now, this instant, is old news.

Whether old or new, news is also information tailored to a specific audience, or “public.”

Suppose a plane crashes at a major metropolitan airport. Instantly news sites and blogs will report the event. The information will make the local paper’s front page the next morning. The same accident could also create a business article detailing the finances of the plane’s corporate owners; a regulatory article discussing how governmental agencies are responding — or have responded in the past — to the type of problem that caused the crash; an airline safety feature in a major national magazine; a review of airplane claims processing in an insurance magazine; a first person account in a monthly magazine; a feature on airport disaster services in a medical journal; ongoing daily and weekly broadcast accounts as the accident is investigated over time and a discussion of how the media covers crashes in a journalism review.

So now we can define news as new information, old information, re-packaged information, expanded or condensed information, information that’s the subject of commentary, personalized information, time-sensitive information, information placed in context, entertaining information, information oriented toward a specific audience and information that for one reason or another is considered unique to a particular audience. In essence, the concept of news is so wondrously elastic that almost any information is news somewhere.

The catch is that with so much potential news there must some way to sort through the many possible items which might appeal to various publics – and that’s why whether online or off we need reporters, columnists and editors.

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