What makes news news? You’d have thought this was fairly simple, but two projects have had me wondering what makes proper news these days.
Wellcome News, the Trust’s main magazine, is published quarterly and every few months I’m tasked with writing the copy. Because of the nature of print deadlines (usually a couple of months before the actual publication date to allow for copyediting, proofreading, design and printing) this often involves writing about things that have yet to happen, meaning that at the time of writing there isn’t much to say about it. This also means that by the time the audience reads about it, the ‘news’ often took place months before.
Meanwhile, as the News Editor of TSR, it’s my job to deliver news articles for the newsletter’s quarterly issue — ‘news’ that more often than not happened months before (do you see a pattern here?). We usually try and do some kind of ‘overview’ or analyses, rounding up the coverage of a particularly big science journalism/communication issue, but really, in the world of 24 hour, real-time information, who wants to read about stuff that already appeared everywhere months ago?
Mun Keat Looi 