One of the earliest lessons you learn in journalism school is the one about news values – that is to say, “What makes news, news?” One of my favorites was the discussion about ‘novelty’ as a news value.
The adage is that “When you hear dog bites man, that’s not news. But when man bites dog, now that’s a story!”
There are examples of novelty news stories in the papers and on the internet all the time but it seems to me that I read a lot of them last weekend and I have heard some others throughout this week.
Holly alerted me to a good one about a professional sports ‘cat-fight’ in Dallas. After the Cowboys dissed the Dallas Stars (and the NHL in general) via Twitter, the Stars got the final word. You just don’t normally see such banter between teams representing different professional sports.
If you haven’t heard this unique sports story, check it out.
Two interesting articles came out of Australia. The first one concerns tremendous heat there this summer. We think it is warm here this January, but what about this? The heat in Australia is so extreme, scientists had to add an extra color to the scale to depict these temperatures.
Makes the Aussies want to run to the beach!
From Brazil comes the story of prisoners trying to sneak contraband into the prison using a well-trained cat. No cake with a file out of this story but we do learn that the cat smuggled in a saw and a cellphone.
Back to Australia for another cat-related tale. In this one, a mother awoke when she heard the family cat hissing. Turns out the cat was hissing at a python that had begun to wrap itself around the small arm of the family’s little baby.
Talk about waking up just ‘in the nick of time.’ Clearly, this was not a welcome house guest.
The snake was trapped and relocated to the wild.
And speaking of unwanted house guests, this week we learned about a lady in Washington state who called the heat and air repairman when her system wasn’t working properly. He did a quick inspection and found that someone had been living in the crawl space under the lady’s house.
The guy (we assume) cut into the ductwork to get some heat for himself and in the process, caused the system to work improperly. Folks speculate he might’ve lived there up to a year.
And we thought it was somewhat of an imposition when our bats moved in last spring!
So, you see a quick spin around the internet can turn up all sorts of unique stories.
Timeliness, Prominence, Proximity, Conflict. These are some of the common news values we learned about as prospective journalists. But of all the news values, one is truly the most novel.
JG
(Source: Mashable)
Originally posted 1/10/2013
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