Today in our workshop we were investigating what makes a news item "news-worthy". What this means is how important is the news story, and at what point in the entire news production should the news item be shown. In order to investigate this, we decided to split up into groups and watch several half hour long news shows and makes notes on the ways they were different or the same.
My group consisted of myself, Andy and Lex.
We decided to choose two news programs that would contrast greatly, and these were the BBC news and Channel 5 news. It was actually quite astounding how similar the reports actually were, although there were one or two small differences. For example, the BBC news report was one consistent report all the way through, with no ad breaks (due to the BBC TV Licensing agreement) while channel 5's news report actually had an ad break. I felt this took the viewer out of the news story and by the time the ad had finished and returned to the news reporting, the viewer could have lost interest.
In terms of the stories that were shown, both began with a report on Remembrance Sunday, and the poppy set-up at London Tower. This makes sense, as it is a massive current event which is taking place. Although this may not have had much relevance with the rest of the world, who may not understand why poppies have so much importance to us as British people, British people would appreciate this kind of news story being shown first in the report.
Both news programs chose a different approach to ending their remembrance reports however. BBC News decided to make comparisons to the soldiers fighting in Syria, and Channel 5 News decided to make comparisons to soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
Something I learnt from this experience is that current events play a massive part in deciding what order a news story should be played in during a report, and also that a lot of news programs may report on the same stories, but may have a different approach to tackling said stories, depending on their stance on certain subjects. This is mostly down to who owns the news station and whether the corporate sponsors of the stations are biased in any way.
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