What is a News Story?

There have been many attempts to define what news is, with perhaps the most memorable being Donald Zec's suggestion that news is "sex, sensation, pets and heroism".

Everyone agrees news has to be factual and new, but beyond this there are plenty of arguments about what makes something news and why.

Giving Readers What They Want

The most obvious approach is that you can judge how good a story is by how much people want to read it and how interesting they find it.

A lecturer once told me that the best way of working out if something is worth writing is the "pub test". This means you should think about whether people in the local pub would be discussing it that night. If they would be talking about it, then it is a good story. If not, then it's not.

You should always remember that newspapers are a business and the main objective of the business is to sell papers. With every story you write, you should ask yourself whether that story will appeal to the readers. If not, then why is it in there?

Making It New

As well as working out whether something is a good story, you also have to make sure it is has a news hook.

To work out the news hook, ask yourself what you know today that you did not know yesterday. This might not be the most interesting aspect, but it is the news hook.

Many badly written articles do not have a news hook and this means they have no sense of urgency to them. Make sure when you read every article through, there is something new in it.

This can sometimes be difficult, particularly when you find out about a great story that has happened a while ago. But it can still be done. Using phrases like "it has been revealed" and "residents have reacted with shock to the news that", it is possible to give a news hook to old stories.

And while most articles should include a prominent mention of "when" the story happened, if it is an old story then do not be afraid to bury this at the end of the article.

Getting a news hook can be a particular problem if a national story breaks on your patch and you do not have an edition coming out for a few days. When this happens, you need to find a new angle because you cannot just repeat what the nationals have said.

Journalistic Responsibility

In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies argues that actually a good journalist should not simply be giving people what they want and it is the responsibility of a journalist to also think about how important that story is.

He highlights the fact that the deaths of two British soldiers in Afghanistan was pushed into second place in the national news schedule by David Beckham's resignation as England captain in 2006.

On a local level, an editor I worked on was wary of covering crimes where the perpetrator was Kosovan because of concern about fuelling racial tensions. This was despite the fact that most people would have been more interested in these incidents than in some of the others that did make the paper that day.

Many local journalists also believe they play a role in the democratic process by telling people what decisions their local councils are making. That information might sometimes be dry, but if it makes a difference to how some people might vote then isn't it the responsibility of journalists to relay the information?

Ultimately, this is something you have to make your own mind about, with advice from your news editor or editor. It will also depend on the style of your newspaper.

Personally, I lean towards the argument that journalists should give people what they want, because when you start making news judgements based on anything else, you start to get into difficult territory. Who are we as journalists to say that two soldiers dying has more relevance to people's lives than David Beckham's resignation?

Geography of News

In My Trade, Andrew Marr argues that news "slows and decays as it travels", by which he means that the further away something happens, the less relevant it seems to our lives. If it is happening far away (such as an earthquake in China), there would have to be a lot of deaths for it to be a big story in the UK.

And in no part of the media industry is geography as important as in local newspapers. A general rule is that unless it something inside your circulation area then it is not worth covering and when there is breaking news on the edge of your patch, it can often be a good idea to look at a map to work out if it is just inside or just outside the boundary before you head off to cover it.

But it is not enough just to be sure something has happened inside your patch, because it can matter where in your patch it happens. If you work on a paper that covers a big town and a couple of surrounding villages, then a story is likely to be bigger if it happens in the town than if the same thing happens in one of the villages. This is because the bulk of your readers are likely to live in the town and therefore be most interested in what happens there.

Because of this, it is worth finding out how well your paper sells throughout your patch. This means you are less likely to spend a long time on something that only affects a village on where your paper only sells a few copies a week.