What is news? Randolf Hearst, the American newspaper magnate, was once quoted as saying: “News is what somebody is trying to hide. All the rest is advertising.” I quite like the definition of Fr Joe Borg, a former editor of Il-Gens, who lectures at the University of Malta, at a forum on TV news, held a few years back. Fr Joe said news is a mixture of factors: · the situation in the country; · the structure of the organisation disseminating the news; · the audience; and · the event itself. Let me elaborate.
The political climate in a country is a great determining factor on the sort of news that is disseminated within the country. To give a local example, during the war we had no ‘opposition’ or pro-Axis newspapers in Malta, like we had before Italy declared war on Britain and France. Another example: the issue of the European Union that dominated the national agenda in the run-up to membership in 2004 to the exclusion of everything else. So much so that the US space shuttle Columbia disaster failed to make an impact on some of the national media in Malta.
The heat of an election campaign influences what the media cover, what we would expect to see, read and hear about in the media — and also what we should (or should not) believe until the elections or referendum are over. The clearest example to illustrate the second point on structure — I would say orientation, to be more precise — is the Media.Link media and the Union Press/MLP media.
What is news to one organisation is not news to the others. You would think, after reading newspapers published by these establishments, that we are talking about two totally different countries. Structure would refer to how the organisation goes about putting the mechanics in place to get the news and the resources it makes available for news gathering: what foreign news agency to subscribe to, if at all; what importance it gives to, for example, parliamentary coverage as opposed to sports coverage; whether it has a group of persons or an individual detailed to cover a particular sector of the news — business news or education, for example. The major French private news station TF 1 has, for example, one of the best electronic archiving systems in the world, with all its material digitised and stored on servers, dating back to 1989. Structure would also refer to the technology used because if the technology is slow the organisation would not be able to afford to wait as long as possible to cover a particular event. Otherwise, it must be prepared to print late and be late on the newsstands.
A newspaper printing machine that can print 30,000 copies an hour — an entire local print run — and mechanically interleave sections at 17,000 copies an hour would enable an organisation to be more flexible in its deadline than a printing machine which takes three hours to print the local run of the paper and has no mechanical interleaving facility.
Who is your audience?
The audience is a very variable part of the news equation. The variability occurs from country to country (although the principles of what audiences perceive as news becomes more and more standard as time goes by) and even in the same country over a period of time. Tragedies like Chernobyl hit the headlines in the West immediately and, yet, the Soviets at first denied that it had happened and only admitted when they knew the West had irrefutable proof of the occurrence. The changes in the former Soviet Union also mean that there might be a different reaction today. Again, changes within the universal Church since Vatican II have led the local Church to a more open-minded approach to the various social forces within the country and to greater liberalisation of thought and action.
Another point to be made on an audience is a rather selfish one: how much self-interest is there in a particular story? How is your story going to affect the general reader? An increase in the price of fuel would be more important to a mass audience in Malta (where the majority of people drive and own cars) than a 10c increase in the price of imported rose cuttings. The announcement that Malta is abolishing exchange control regulations and that Maltese nationals can now invest all their money abroad is more important to us Maltese than the announcement that Malta is to open an embassy in Iceland.
