News: the ‘maleness’ of news?A B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWCompanies in the US were the first to add
sound to newsreels, and in the UK British
Movietone was the fi rst to adopt sound (1928).
In the 1930s the outstanding newsreel in the US
was the march of time series. News on TV
eventually put an end to cinema newsreels. See
cinematography, origins; documentary.
Newsroom, The Museum, research and educa-
tional centre set up in Farringdon Road, London,
in 2002 by the Scott Trust, telling the story of the
Trust’s sister papers, the Observer (the world’s
oldest Sunday newspaper, over 200 years old)
and the Guardian. Th e Newsroom contains exhi-
bitions of photo-journalism, documents, diaries,
etc. kept by some of the most distinguished
of the papers’ writers; features a permanent
interactive exhibition telling the history of the
two papers, and an oral history recording staff
recollections going back several decades; and
has a 90-seat lecture theatre. Students have the
opportunity to use the archive’s resources, and
student groups are encouraged to produce their
own newspapers using the latest technology.
News selection See agenda-setting;
galtung and ruge’s model of selective
gatekeeping, 1965; news values; proto-
tying concept; rogers and dearing’s
agenda-setting model, 1987.
News: structure of reassurance In Represent-
ing Order: Crime, Law And Justice in the News
Media (Open University Press, 1991), Richard
Ericson, Patricia M. Barnek and Janet B.L. Chan
argue that in the construction of reality in news
production, a guiding function of the journalist
and editor is to render things ‘plausible’ and thus
‘provide a familiar discourse, based in common
sense and precedent’. Th is plausibility ‘in turn
provides a structure of reassurance, a tool of
acknowledging the familiar’: by asserting the
plausible-become-familiar the news construc-
tion process silences alternative defi nitions.
News: the ‘maleness’ of news? If the news
is to be ascribed a gender classifi cation, some
commentators argue that it is essentially ‘male’:
male-orientated in terms of decisions over
content, over news values and in the practical
matter of who gathers, reports, edits and pres-
ents the news.
In Feminist Media Studies (Sage, 1994, new
edition 2000), Lisbet van Zoonen argues that
women journalists are often expected, by male
colleagues and by the organizations employing
them, to perform professionally in a manner
diff erent from men; to subscribe to expecta-
tions of ‘femininity’. ‘Women,’ writes van
Zoonen, ‘are confronted by social and culturalOceania, and where the TV screen could actually
hear what viewers were saying and see whether
they were indulging in one of the worst of all
crimes, private reading. Guardian of Newspeak,
the offi cial language divested of all superfl uities
by the meaning defi ned by the State, was the
Ministry of Truth (which, incidentally, had a
sub-section called Pornsoc).
Orwell’s appendix to the novel, Th e Principles
of Newspeak, explains that Newspeak was ‘not
only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of Ingsoc (English Socialism), but to
make all other modes of thought impossible’.
Though the word ‘free’ would be retained in
Newspeak, its meaning applied in the sense of
‘Th is dog is free from lice’.
News: public relations news (PRN) Defi ned
by Karmen Erjavec in an article entitled ‘Hybrid
public relations news discourse’ in the European
Journal of Communication (June 2005) as
pertaining ‘to all published news that contains
basically unchanged PR [public relations] infor-
mation, that appears without citing the source
and attempts to promote or protect certain
people or organizations’. Th e author talks of a
‘colonization of news discourse by PR’, its typical
feature being ‘the fact that commercialization
dictates its nature and prescribes the limits of
public interest’, a judgment echoed by a number
of media analysts. See consent, manufacture
of.
News: rage inducement What happens if a
news service trades in emotions – those of the
audience – rather than facts and reason? You are
likely to have ‘rage inducement’; that is, the way
the news is slanted, the way it plays on anxiety,
fear and prejudice both stirs those sentiments in
the audience and off ers a justifi cation for having
them. Commentators cite Fox News in the US
(part of the Murdoch news corp stable) as an
exemplar of this approach. Rage inducement
could, in this sense, be regarded as a news
value.
Newsreel Th e Lumière brothers fathered news-
reel fi lm at the birth of the cinema, from 1895,
but the first regular newsreel, Pathé-Journal,
began in 1908, and French infl uence upon news
on fi lm was considerable for many years.
Th e First World War (1914–18) gave impetus
to newsreel especially in Germany, and with the
Revolution in Russia (1917) propaganda-newsreel
(see agitprop) was regarded by the Communist
government as being of vital importance in the
war for hearts and minds. Dziga Vertov’s Kino-
Pravda newsreel series ran from 1922 to 1925.