4 The purpose and meaning of news
Events, dear boy, events
Harold Macmillan
quoted in Hayward, A. (1997). Politics. Macmillan. p. 387.
News values, news judgement, can only be exercised if and when news is collected. Potential news is everywhere. It is lying waiting to be reported. To collect this information, reporters need to know what is going on, and where.
Tunstall (1971) says that news flow (by which he means news collection) is similar to the flow of other sorts of communication, such as telephones or transportation. This is true, for example, of North America and Western Europe, where there is both particularly heavy news collection and telephone traffic. Of course today this is where the heaviest Internet and computer traffic also ...
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