News is information about recent events that an editor or an algorithm judges important enough to surface to an audience. The definition has been contested for four centuries and rewritten with every new distribution technology — from the printing press to radio, television, the internet, and social media.
By EPR Editorial Team · Edited on Jul 1, 2026
This page is the Everything-PR pillar on the subject: what makes something news, who decides, how the system evolved, why some stories detonate and most die in inboxes, and what "newsworthy" actually means today.
1. What Makes Something News
Journalism schools have taught the same six news values for roughly a century. They still hold.
- Timeliness. If it happened today, it competes. If it happened last week, it needs a new angle.
- Conflict. Two forces in opposition — labor vs. management, regulator vs. company, candidate vs. candidate. Conflict is the single most reliable predictor of coverage. The Watergate and Enron stories were conflict stories before they were anything else.
- Novelty. Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is.
- Impact. How many people are affected, and how seriously. A factory closing in a town of 8,000 is local news. The same closing inside a Fortune 500 supply chain is global news.
- Prominence. Who is involved. A car accident is a police-blotter item; the same accident involving a sitting senator, a CEO, or a celebrity becomes a national story.
- Human interest. The story that earns the share, the read-to-the-end, the emotional click. The Thai cave rescue in 2018. Human interest is the lubricant that lets harder news travel.
A working test: a story that satisfies three of the six values gets covered. Four gets covered widely. Five or six is a magazine cover, a documentary, a permanent entry in the cultural record.
2. Who Decides What Is News
For most of the twentieth century, fewer than 2,000 editors in the United States — at The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, the three broadcast networks, the major regional papers — set the national agenda. That model is gone.
- Editors. Still the highest signal. A New York Times A1 placement, a Wall Street Journal scoop, a 60 Minutes segment, a BBC top-of-hour — these are the placements every brand wants.
- Journalists. The reporter, not the outlet, increasingly carries the trust. Kara Swisher, Casey Newton, Matt Taibbi — independent journalists with portable audiences.
- Algorithms. Meta's ranking algorithm, Twitter's timeline, YouTube's homepage. These systems shape what billions of people see every day. None of them are run by editors. All of them are tuned to engagement, which is not the same as importance.
- Social media. Twitter is still the assignment desk of American journalism. Reddit threads break technology, finance, and gaming stories before any newsroom touches them.
In 1995, a public-relations professional needed to influence fifty editors. Today, the same professional needs to influence editors, algorithmic feeds, and a long tail of independent journalists. The skillset has widened.
3. The History of News
Every era of news has been defined by the dominant distribution technology of its time. The format dictated what counted as news.
- Newspapers (1690 – present). The Boston News-Letter in 1704, Benjamin Day's New York Sun in 1833 dropping the price to a penny and inventing the mass-market daily, the rise of Pulitzer and Hearst, the post-war consolidation into one or two papers per city. Print taught the world that news was a daily product.
- Radio (1920s – 1940s dominance, still active). KDKA Pittsburgh in 1920. Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London during the Blitz. Radio made news immediate — you could hear an event while it was still happening.
- Television (1950s – 2000s dominance). Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News at one point reached 29 million households a night. The Vietnam War was the first televised war. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate proved that on TV, how you looked mattered as much as what you said. CNN arrived in 1980; Fox News in 1996 added ideological framing as a business model.
- Internet (1990s – present). The Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky story in 1998 — the first time a website beat the establishment press to a presidency-altering scoop. The blog era of 2000–2010. The rise of digital natives: Politico, BuzzFeed News, Axios. Newspaper revenue cratered from roughly $49 billion in 2005 to a fraction of that a decade later.
- Social media (2006 – present). Twitter launched in 2006 and within a decade was where most breaking news broke first. Facebook's News Feed became, briefly, the largest news distributor in human history. The Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the 2016 U.S. election — all narrated in real time on platforms owned by four or five companies.
Each transition compressed the previous one. Radio did not kill newspapers, but it ended their monopoly on immediacy. Television did not kill radio, but it took the dinner-hour audience. The internet did not kill television, but it ended the appointment-viewing economy.
4. Why Some Stories Go Viral
Virality is not random. Jonah Berger's research at Wharton on the New York Times most-emailed list found that stories triggering high-arousal emotions — awe, anger, anxiety, amusement — outperform stories triggering low-arousal emotions like sadness or contentment by orders of magnitude.
- Emotion. A story has to make the reader feel something strong enough to share. Neutral information rarely travels.
- Fear. Threat triggers attention faster than any other stimulus.
- Outrage. The 2017 United Airlines passenger dragged off Flight 3411 generated more global coverage in 48 hours than the airline's previous decade of marketing. Outrage scales because it gives the sharer a moral position to occupy.
- Celebrity. Prominence amplifies every other value. A breakup involving two unknown people is gossip. A breakup involving Taylor Swift is global news for two weeks.
- Tribal identity. Stories that confirm what one group already believes about another travel furthest. This is the dynamic that built Fox News and MSNBC into separate ecosystems.
The cost of this system: stories that confirm priors beat stories that complicate them. Truth and virality are weakly correlated.
5. What Is Not News
Editors filter aggressively. Most of what is pitched as news is not.
- Advertising. A paid placement, no matter how cleverly disguised. The Federal Trade Commission requires disclosure on sponsored content.
- Marketing. A new product launch is news only if the product is genuinely new, the company is genuinely prominent, or the launch has a genuine impact. Most launches are none of those three.
- Corporate announcements nobody cares about. A new VP of Customer Success at a Series B startup is not news. A new CEO at a Fortune 500 company is.
- Content disguised as journalism. Affiliate-link product roundups, SEO chaff, press releases reformatted as articles. The audience learns to spot it.
Rule of thumb: if the only reason to publish is that the subject wants it published, it is not news. If the subject would rather it not be published, it almost certainly is.
6. News vs. Public Relations
Public relations is the practice of earning coverage in news media. Journalism is the practice of producing it. The two have always been adversarial in theory and symbiotic in practice. Roughly 50 percent of what runs in the average daily paper originates with a public-relations source. That number has been stable for forty years.
Why journalists ignore 99 percent of pitches:
- No news value. The pitch satisfies none of the six values in Section 1.
- No exclusivity. The pitch has been sent to 200 other reporters.
- No primary source. No data, no on-the-record source, no document. Reporters cannot build a story on a press release.
- No fit. The reporter covers enterprise software, not consumer beauty. The pitcher did not read three of their bylines before sending.
- No urgency. The pitch is for a launch in six weeks, with no embargo and no reason to act now.
What actually earns coverage:
- Original research. A proprietary dataset, a survey, an index — the kind of asset that generates a Reuters wire, a Bloomberg follow, a CNBC hit, and twenty trade pickups from a single drop.
- Exclusive access. An interview no one else can get, a document no one else has seen, a venue no one else can enter.
- Timing. Tying a pitch to a real news event happening this week, not next quarter.
- A relationship. Reporters cover sources they trust. Trust takes years. There is no shortcut.
- A clear story. Subject, verb, object. Who did what to whom, and why it matters.
Five percent of pitches drive 95 percent of placements. The discipline is in writing for the 5 percent.
7. Examples of Stories That Changed History
Five stories that demonstrate what news can do when it actually works.
- Watergate (1972 – 1974). Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post, working with an FBI source later identified as Mark Felt, traced a third-rate burglary at the DNC headquarters to President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. Nixon resigned August 9, 1974. Still the benchmark for investigative reporting.
- Pentagon Papers (1971). Daniel Ellsberg leaked 7,000 pages of a classified Defense Department history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Times in New York Times Co. v. United States, establishing a near-absolute First Amendment protection against prior restraint.
- Enron (2001 – 2002). Bethany McLean's March 2001 Fortune article — "Is Enron Overpriced?" — asked the question no Wall Street analyst would. By December 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy in what was then the largest corporate collapse in U.S. history. Arthur Andersen ceased to exist. Sarbanes-Oxley became law in 2002.
- Panama Papers (2016). The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists coordinated more than 370 reporters across 80 countries to analyze 11.5 million leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. The Prime Minister of Iceland resigned within days.
- Deepwater Horizon (2010). The explosion of the BP-leased rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and produced the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. Coverage sustained across print, cable, and digital for months and rewrote how regulators approach offshore drilling.
Each of these stories shared a common structure: a primary-source document or dataset, a journalist or team willing to work the story for months or years, and a publication willing to absorb the legal and commercial risk of running it. None of those three ingredients are obsolete.
8. FAQ
What is news? News is information about recent or developing events that an editor or algorithm judges important enough to surface to an audience. The judgment is made against criteria including timeliness, conflict, novelty, impact, prominence, and human interest.
What makes a story newsworthy? A story is newsworthy if it satisfies three or more of the classical news values: timeliness, conflict, novelty, impact, prominence, and human interest.
What is breaking news? Breaking news is information about an event that is happening right now or just happened, where speed of reporting is itself part of the news value. Cable, Twitter, and live-blog formats are the dominant venues.
What is fake news? Fake news is content fabricated or knowingly distorted, presented in a journalistic format, and distributed with the intent to deceive. The term is also used loosely and politically to describe accurate reporting the subject does not like. Both usages now exist in parallel.
What is citizen journalism? Citizen journalism is reporting produced by non-professional journalists — eyewitnesses, residents, hobbyists — and distributed through social media, blogs, and YouTube. Citizen journalists broke the 2009 Iran election protests, the 2011 Arab Spring, and a substantial share of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing aftermath.
9. The Future of News
The structural shift is not gradual. Print revenue keeps falling. Television audiences keep aging. Social platforms keep absorbing the attention of the next generation of readers.
What replaces the old model is not yet fixed. The publications, brands, and people who understand the new system — who build for the platforms where audiences actually spend their attention — will own the next era of public influence. The ones who keep optimizing for a lost distribution model will spend the next decade wondering where the audience went.
News is not ending. The format is changing again, as it has every fifty years for four centuries.
