News as Purposive Behavior: On the Strategic Use of Routine Events, Accidents, and Scandals

TLDR

News functions as purposive behavior that categorizes events into routines, accidents, scandals, and serendipitous incidents, revealing societal organization and power dynamics while enabling both professional newsworkers and everyday observers to construct and share meaning about otherwise inaccessible happenings. The study discusses the implications of this event typology for analyses of media influence and power relations. Everyone needs news.

Abstract

The manner in which access is accomplished can vary and these variations lead to a typology of event types: routines, accidents, scandals and serendipitous events. Each type of event tends to reveal different kinds of information about the ways society is organized, and each type holds different challenges to those who have or lack power. The general implications of this schema for the study of media and power are discussed. veryone needs news. In everyday life, news tells us what we do not experience directly and thus renders otherwise remote happenings observable and meaningful. Conversely, we fill each other in with news. Although those who make their living at newswork (reporters, copy editors, publishers, typesetters, etc. have additional needs for news, all individuals, by virtue of the ways they attend to and give accounts of what they believe to be a pregiven world, are daily newsmakers.