News waves
New Wave In the year 1959–60 an astonish-
ing sixty-seven new directors made their fi lm
debut in France: this was the nouvelle vague as
Françoise Giroud described it. At the crest of the
wave were critics writing for the fi lm magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma, including François Truf-
faut (1932–84), Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and
Claude Chabrol (b. 1930). Th eir fi lms were made
cheaply, often with unknown actors, improviza-
tion, hand-held cameras and location shooting,
and without huge teams of technicians.
The New Wave were always a loose-knit
grouping of individual directors, and it was
individualism – the belief in the fi lm director as
auteur – which was their common characteris-
tic. Th ey reacted against the studio product and
produced films of extraordinary richness and
variety. Others in the Wave have been Alain
Resnais, Chris Marker, Eric Rohmer, Jacques
Rivette, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim and Agnès
Vard a.
N-Gen Short for Net-Generation, a term describ-
ing young people familiar with, and users of, the
internet and digital technology in general.
The ‘N-Geners’ are characterized by a level
of mediacy that marks them out from their
parents’ generation.
‘Niche’ audiences In the digital age where in
terms of programming and advertising the
internet has made inroads into traditional
media operations, audiences have become more
fragmented, less easy to target and arguably
respond with higher and more specifi c expecta-
tions; hence the increasing need for more closely
tailored approaches. The problem is not only
locating more specifi cally identifi ed audiences,
but also tracking an essentially volatile market
and ensuring that the ‘niche’ is suffi ciently broad
to match investment and future prospects.
Nickelodeon An early and primitive form of
cinema, of immense popularity in the US by
1905, usually consisting of a long, narrow room
furnished with wooden bench seats and very
basic equipment for fi lm projection; frequently
converted from a shop or store. The term is
thought to have been used by showman John
P. Harris, combining the Greek for theatre with
the slang expression for the fi ve cents charged
for admission. Th e English equivalent was the
penny gaf.
Soon the Nickelodeon gave way to the more
stately fi lm-houses. In 1913, Mitchell L. Mark
bought the Strand Theatre, a 3,000-seater
on Broadway, New York, and set in motion a
fashion for neo-Baroque splendour. Th e movies
had moved upmarket. Much later, the jukeboxapplied to everybody from politicians to pop
musicians and soap opera “stars”’.
Brighton and Foy acknowledge that the
hypotheses of Galtung and Ruge ‘were absolutely
fi ne for their time and in their intended context
of social and behavioural studies ... But as Bob
Dylan once put it, Th ings Have Changed’. Q u i t e
simply, media communication has become
global with the ‘emergence of borderless broad-
cast and publishing operations’.
Fresh values are called for, applying to a multi-
plicity of media; and these values, in the view
of Brighton and Foy, ‘will vary from medium to
medium, and from each individual package to the
next’. Th e authors off er their own listing of seven
values. (1) Relevance (the signifi cance of a news
item to the viewer, listener or reader). (2) Topical-
ity (is it new, current, immediately relevant?). (3)
Composition (how a news item fi ts with other
items that surround it). (4) Expectation (does
the consumer expect to be told about this?). (5)
Unusualness (what sets it apart from other events
that are not reported?). (6) Worth (does it justify
its appearance in the news?). (7) External infl u-
ences (is the content of a news item pure, or has it
been corrupted by pressure from outside, such as
a proprietor, an advertiser or a politician?).
Th e authors are also of the view that ‘position-
ing, inclusion or exclusion, and juxtapositions
[of news items] are all fi ltered through aesthetic
criteria to an extent greater than is widely
appreciated’. See galtung and ruge’s model
of selective gatekeeping, 1965; immediacy;
impartiality; news management in times
of war. See also topic guides under commu-
nication theory and news media.
▶James Watson, Media Communication: An Intro-
duction to Th eory and Process (Palgrave/Macmillan,
3rd edition, 2008), Chapter 5, ‘The news, gates,
agendas and values’.
News waves Media coverage of an event ‘makes
waves’, that is causes a momentum of its own;
the coverage becomes its own headlines. In a
European Journal of Communication article,
December 2005 entitled ‘Media hype: self-rein-
forcing news waves, journalistic standards and
the construction of social problems’, Peter L.M.
Vasterman writes of a ‘mismatch between these
news waves and the real world the media are
supposed to cover ... During these news waves,
the media not the event seem to be governing
the coverage’. Consequently ‘the media some-
times create a chain of events that would not
have taken place without their involvement’.
New visibility See demotic turn; panopti-
con gaze; pornography.