Life appears to be a shapeless jumble of events, falling over each other, elbowing and jostling each other. Journalists each day structure this chaos, so that the public receives it sorted out and neatly packaged into stories, the same day on radio, television or online and the next day in newspapers. It will have been evaluated. The biggest news will be given first in the bulletin or on Page One of the paper, in detail; lesser news will be given in less detail later in the bulletin or on an inside page of the newspaper.
Have you ever thought about how we get news? There are various sources of news. You can hear it on the radio, view it on a television channel, read it in a newspaper or surf it on the internet with a computer. Here in Ghana, people in the remotest and sometimes inaccessible communities, get the news from radio and television several hours and sometimes a few days earlier before the newspaper arrives. According to the Collins English Dictionary, “News is information about a recently changed situation or a recent event.”
However, news is something that you come across every day in your life. What makes news? John Bogart has given this comment that became synonymous with news. When a dog bites a man, it is no news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news. This may seem true, sometimes, when a dog bites a man that can also become news. Suppose a dog bites a famous film star, it definitely makes big news. It is said that the letters in the word “NEWS” is derived from the four directions as indicated below:
N orth
E ast
W est
S outh
This shows that news can come from anywhere. News is the report of a current event, something that was not known, information of recent events and happenings.
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