Journalism Portfolio - Essay Example

Most news may be intended to deflect or defuse public opinion on matters of great importance and editors can influence the direction of how opinion is shaped. When a newspaper is owned by a politician, then there might be truth to the statement that “news is what someone, somewhere wants concealed” as in the case of Italy today. As mentioned earlier, this newspaper is mostly of community-type of publication and so most of its stories are local in nature. Most of the sources were the local news reporters that had gathered the news scoop within their areas.

However, some of the news with a wider look such as global news content had been rehashes (re-written) of global news organizations as it has no capability of news gathering that is global in scope. Anyway, this is the trend today in most news organizations whereby they become aggregators of various news sources which it had deemed newsworthy to be included in their own publications. In the Internet age today, it is far more economical to just subscribe to some big news organizations like CNN or Time to syndicate the same news materials and ask a reporter to re-write it with a local background.

Discussion In a world of instant news and competition for crucial publication space, the news of today has to be carefully selected that will interest its target audience. The readers of this type of newspaper would normally be interested on matters that concern them and only later will they go on to other news happening much further afield. For example, the most recent news of a dead whale carcass washing ashore should be of greater interest to its readers because this event can be considered as a rarity (it is not everyday a dead whale is washed onto the sands).

Its news value may be in its ability to shock some readers to make them wander how could an event like this happen (Carr 1) and adding a photograph could lend a certain bit of nostalgia. The dead whale would be of concern to local residents because of the intense stink it brought. A public figure is normally defined to be someone who is usually in the limelight and this by necessity includes public figures like politicians, artists and actors or actresses. They opted for a profession that requires them public exposure or may have fame or prominence so that their lives are the focus of intense public scrutiny.

A celebrity, on the other hand, is a type of person who acquired a certain persona such as rock stars, movie stars or sports stars. They are very familiar to the general public and their actions and statements are closely followed in most of the time. A public figure has less claims to privacy than an ordinary person since their lives are open to the public by virtue of their standing in the community or society. If a public figure is the subject of a bad news article, then he or she must first prove his status as a public figure in order to establish an evil motive in writing that article, such as malice or hate.

Other citizens enjoy a higher degree of privacy in this regard because they are not in the public eye. The private lives of public figures can be written quite easily with mostly no objections but if the writer has written something defamatory, then a libel suit can be filed by concerned party.