News Reporting: 5Ws and 1H

 Sunayan Bhattacharjee: Assistant Professor

Centre for Print & Cyber Journalism Skills

News reporting is indeed an interesting field, more so because it somehow satisfies one of the most primordial human instincts – the penchant to know the unknown. Before getting down to the intricacies of what news reporting should aspire to do, it is important we understand what news is. Contrary to popular perceptions, news doesn’t stand for north, east, west and south. If we trace the etymology of the word news, we shall find that it is nothing but the plural form of new. So, it becomes obvious that news essentially deals with new things. Is it? No, it isn’t always so. To understand better, let us look a bit further. The Cambridge Dictionary defines news as “information or reports about recent events” and the Oxford Dictionary defines it as “newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent events.” It is pertinent to mention here that while the event might at times be old, the information need to be essentially new. This is exactly where news reporting comes in.

News reporting involves the discovery of relevant information, sorting and presenting the information in a packaged form and narrating a logically coherent story. However, the process is not as simple as the definition. There are events and information that are newsworthy and there are some that are not. For an event to be newsworthy, there are some fundamental traits to be satisfied. These traits are together known as news values. Let us see what these values are:

1. Impact: The readability of a news is largely dependent on how it affects the life of the readers. The greater the consequences, the more newsworthy is the event. Let us take an example to understand. If the United States of America threatens North Korea with a nuclear attack, it certainly needs a big coverage for the simple reason that a nuclear warfare between the United States and North Korea might very well end the world. Let us look at it in specific terms. The Year 2000 problem, popularly known as the Y2K problem or the Y2K bug or the millennium bug or the Y2K was a bug that was supposed to create computing problems throughout the world. Although, nothing substantial happened, there were a string of news reports throughout the world just before the dawn of the year 2000. Everyone was concerned about it subject to its impact on all sorts of human activities. Now, this was reported primarily because of the impact factor.

2. Timeliness: News is all about a sense of timing. Something that is happening right now makes for better news than something that happened a couple of days back. A murder that was committed ten days back doesn’t make a good piece of news. We can also try to understand the concept with the help of a more directed example. In the year 2010, Naxalites brutally slaughtered a convoy of paramilitary forces at Dantewada in Chhattisgarh. When the incident happened, it was reported by almost all the news organizations instantly. While the impact was huge, it had to be reported on an immediate basis. If the news would have been delayed, it wouldn’t have been any news at all as everyone would have come to know about it anyway. In this case, the timeliness factor was absolutely important.

3. Prominence: Is the subject being covered important enough? The speech by the Chief Minister of a state makes for good news but the speech by an NGO activist doesn’t unless he/ she talks about something so path-breaking that the content becomes more important than the content provider. When the Indian Prime Minister speaks on Mann Ki Baat, all the news organizations invariably report on it irrespective of the content. Even if the Prime Minister doesn’t reveal anything significant, the fact that he spoke will make news. This works subject to the prominence factor.

4. Proximity: Is the event happening anywhere near you? The place of occurrence is important in the selection of news. An educational seminar happening in Mumbai might be newsworthy for readers in Mumbai but mightn’t necessarily be so in Hyderabad. Guwahati, Assam’s largest city and the nerve centre of the Northeast, was rocked by a series of explosions in the year 2008. The incident led to a lot of deaths and was reported prominently across all the eastern states. However, the same wasn’t reported across many of the newspapers in the Southern and Northern states. This was so because the event wasn’t important enough to be reported in those states. In this case, the proximity factor worked.

5. Uniqueness: Without getting into any detail, it would suffice to say that a man biting a dog makes news while the vice versa doesn’t. If it is something strange and big, it makes news. Quite a few news organizations reported when a 440-pound shark jumped into the boat of an Australian fisherman. While the news in itself was nothing significant, it made news because people like to know about weird stuff. Consequently, this news satisfies the uniqueness factor.

6. Conflict: As much as it is reprehensible, men has an innate tenacity towards fights and conflicts and more so when it is at a distance. News satiates that tenacity. A war or a conflict or a scuffle always makes news. When there is a communal riot anywhere in the country, it makes news. The Gujarat Communal Carnage that happened in the aftermath of the Godhra Train Burning incident in the year 2002 was reported by all the news organizations in the country and abroad. In this case, the factor that      worked was conflict.

7. Currency: A futuristic yet contemporary idea that is set to become big always makes news. A new scientific or a technological innovation will always have an intrinsic news importance. When the Large Hadron Collider experiment was conducted in the year 2015, it made big news. The experiment was significant on a large number of scientific counts. The factor that drilled its way through was currency.

8. Human Interest: Empathy and sympathy, as redundant as the ideas might be, still hold sway over a significant section of the civil society. Something that evokes emotion is always newsworthy. For example, a concerted movement against mindless industrial expansionism is extremely important to be covered as a piece of news. Vidarbha, which is one of the most economically backward regions in Maharashtra, still continues to top the charts when it comes to farmers’ suicides. With lopsided development plans and faulty interventionism, the region is languishing in utter poverty. When a feature story is written on what needs to be accomplished to resurrect the situation, it strikes a number of human chords, the primary being sympathy. Consequently, this news satisfies the factor of human interest.

Now knowing the facts that we do, it might as well be helpful to comprehend that not always do we get dictated by ideal conditions while doing journalism. Hence events that satisfy none of the conditions enshrined above might also categorize as news at times based on muscle power or power of the coffer. However, does these abominations define the usual? No, they don’t and that is exactly the reason why we are having this discourse.

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Assistant Professor – A journalism postgraduate from the prestigious Symbiosis Institute of Media Communication in Pune, Sunayan earlier worked with renowned organizations such as The Times of India and Reuters News. He is a UGC-NET qualified scholar and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in film studies from Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University. He is also the Associate Editor of The Cinemaholic.