Thursday, 27 March 2008

Broadcast News: Revision

Regularly watch news broadcasts and take note of what is considered news (Galtung and Ruge).

Watch Panorama.

Who presents the news? Are there news stars? How important is news to the institutions that carry the broadcasts?

Go over the notes and make new sets of notes. Try to condence notes down.

Are you aware of bias in bulletins? Why is this?

Is the news dumbed down by some institutions? Which ones? Analyse broadcasts for length and complexity of individual items. Do some "shows" carry more celebrity or sports news? Do some of them seem to have more "human interest" stories.

2 comments:

phill said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
phill said...

News and current affairs programmes are often seen as unpopular due to the fact that they are not meant for the sole purpose of entertainment, but also as an information service. Real life events may lack the surrealism and excitement that viewers could gather from watching a film or a programme made just for entertainment purposes. In comparison to other forms of media, news and current affairs can be seen as boring, and therefore unpopular. Also, when looking at different news channels or programmes, individual news programs can be seen as not as interesting, in relation to other news programmes. This could be due to the type of coverage that they have, i.e. local, national, or international. It could also be to do with the type of news that they present, so sky sports could be seen as more popular than political news, or the weather.
Certain current affairs programmes may appear more popular for the issues that they discuss. However it is also important to consider how controversial the issues that are being addressed are. The controversial the issue is, the more interest it will attract, and therefore the more popular it will be.
In order to become more popular, or to be seen as reliable, news programmes compete with each other for viewers. If a news company gets a story broadcasted before another, then this attracts more viewers due to it being new news, and reduces the number of viewers that will watch the same story at a later time on the competing news programmes, as people will have already seen the story, and it will be old news. It is therefore very important to the news groups to get the story first to raise the number of viewers, and to prevent the loss of viewers. Also, the programmes reputation will improve. In order to get the story first, news companies have bureaus stationed across the coverage area, in order to get a reporter to the scene faster. So, if a news group reports internationally, they would have a bureau in every continent, or country. If a news group cannot get a reporter to the scene, they will attempt to buy the story from Reuters, a company that sells stories worldwide.
Competition is also relevant when two or more news programmes have the same story, but one programme has more information than the others. If the story in question was more popular, or attracts a large amount of interest, then viewers would change the channel to watch the programme with more information. This would result in a rise in viewers for the more informed programme, and a reduction in viewers for the other programmes, as they will lose viewers to the more successful programme.
When a news programme is presented it has to interest the viewer to prevent them from changing the channel. In order to do this, the programme must draw the viewer in. to gain a viewers attention, all of the main stories are given a brief mention, and are then referred to in detail, in turn, later on in the news report. This is similar to the sales technique used by news papers in which the main story is headlined and the articles is partially on the front page, but the reader has to turn a few pages to complete the story.
News programs and current affairs programmes are scheduled for times when there is least likely to be other programmes serving as a distraction. For example, at 6 ‘0’ clock, news is shown on most major television channels, at the same time. This means that the only programme that the news will have to contend with will be other news programmes.