Pre-Production: Local Newspaper

Newsworthiness

This is the word applied to how important and how deserving a particular story is of being covered within a piece of journalistic media such as a newspaper. This can also be subdivided into categories entitled; news values and bias.

News Values

This describes the level of prominence given to a certain story or type of story by different media outlets. This is particularly true for newspapers. The news worthiness values vary from paper to paper, for example tabloid newspapers will contain more coverage of stories involving celebrities for example whereas broadsheets such as the times will contain more political stories designed appeal to an older more middle class demographic compared to primary audience of tabloid newspapers such as the sun which have an audience more within the working class.

Bias

Bias within media outlets such as the news is often carried out in order to support particular political parties, leaders or ideologies. This means that when a media organisation is bias they will only run stories beneficial to the institution that they are tied with or support, they may also run other stories but will attempt to slant them in order to show their partner in a beneficial light.

Other types of bias normaly found within newspapers include:

• Corporate bias - The practice of using news to support the media corporation that owns that particular media outlet and using the news that is covered to improve peoples opinions of that corporation.
• Mainstream bias - This is the term used to describe the practice of only covering what other newspapers are covering at the same time and not running stories that are different from the ordinary at that time and may single out that particular media company as controversial.
• Sensationalism - This is when media outlets only cover high profile events and events that do not happen on a regular basis. When this is done regularly it starts to conceive the view that only big events like this happen and that these are the norm due to the lack of coverage of more expected day to day stories.

Local Newspaper

A local newspaper is a newspaper that applies its coverage to a small area such as a county or a city. These newspapers do not cover large scale national and international issues normaly unless they affect the audience within their distribution area and the area that they actually cover. These newspapers often have a smaller demographic than larger newspapers and appeal to a more specific middle aged group.