News broadcasting

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(Redirected from
Newscast
)

Al Jazeera English newsroom, Doha, 2011

News broadcasting is the medium of broadcasting various news events and other information via television, radio, or the internet in the field of broadcast journalism. The content is usually either produced locally in a radio studio or television studio newsroom, or by a broadcast network. A news broadcast may include material such as sports coverage, weather forecasts, traffic reports, political commentary, expert opinions, editorial content, and other material that the broadcaster feels is relevant to their audience. An individual news program is typically reported in a series of individual stories that are presented by one or more anchors. A frequent inclusion is live or recorded interviews by field reporters.

Structure, content, and style

Television

Television news programs inform and discuss current events via the medium of television. A "news bulletin" or a "newscast" are television programs lasting from seconds to hours that provide updates on events. Programs can vary their focus; some newscasts discuss largely international or national matters, while others will focus on regional and local news events.[citation needed]

Example providers of generalist broadcast news shows focusing on national and international matters include

business news. Local programming covers the many examples of smaller stations with a regional focus.[citation needed
]

Newscasts, also known as bulletins or news program(me)s, differ in content, tone, and presentation style depending on the format of the channel/station on which they appear, and their timeslot. In most parts of the world, national television networks will have bulletins featuring national and international news. The top-rated shows will often air in the evening during "prime time", but there are also

newsmagazines) may mix news coverage with topical lifestyle issues, debates, or entertainment content. Public affairs programs provide analysis of and interviews about political, social, and economic issues.[citation needed
]

News programs feature one or two (sometimes, three) anchors (or presenters, the terminology varies around the world) segueing into news stories filed by a reporter (or correspondent) by describing the story to be shown; however, some stories within the broadcast are read by the presenter themselves; in the former case, the anchor "tosses" to the reporter to introduce the featured story; likewise, the reporter "tosses" back to the anchor once the taped report has concluded and the reporter provides additional information. Often in situations necessitating long-form reporting on a story (usually during breaking news situations), the reporter is interviewed by the anchor, known as a 'two-way', or a guest involved in or offering analysis on the story is interviewed by a reporter or anchor. There may also be breaking news stories which will present live rolling coverage.[citation needed]

Television news organizations employ several anchors and reporters to provide reports (as many as ten anchors, and up to 20 reporters for local news operations or up to 30 for national news organizations). They may also employ specialty reporters that focus on reporting certain types of news content (such as traffic or entertainment), meteorologists or weather anchors (the latter term often refers to weather presenters that do not have degrees in meteorology earned at an educational institution) who provide weather forecasts – more common in local news and on network morning programs – and sports presenters that report on ongoing, concluded, or upcoming Packages will usually be filmed at a relevant location and edited in an editing suite in a newsroom or a remote contribution edit suite in a location some distance from the newsroom. They may also be edited in mobile editing vans, or satellite vans or trucks (such as

character graphics (CG), teleprompters, and professional video cameras. Most news shows are broadcast live.[citation needed
]

Radio

Radio news is transmitted through the medium of radio, meaning it is audio-only. It was a dominant form of information dissemination to households from the 1910s−1940s before home televisions became cheap and common. Radio news has persisted, often with short updates at certain intervals on the hour, although the medium of radio has generally shifted toward people doing something else such as driving, working or waking up, compared to television.

Radio news broadcasts can range from as little as one minute to as much as the station's entire schedule, such as the case of all-news radio, or talk radio. Stations that use a "wheel" format tend to keep to a set schedule of certain programming at certain specific minutes on the hour, and one of these segments is frequently a news bulletin. These short bulletins will provide overviews of any breaking news of interest, and may include local concerns such as weather forecasts or traffic reports.[1]

Internet

The vast majority of professionally produced video or audio news on the Internet tends to be attached to existing news organizations. Radio stations will upload their news reports as streamable podcasts and television networks will sometimes make their broadcasts available over Internet video. Print newspapers will sometimes feature video on their websites for breaking news events and for long-form video journalism. The usual focus on the Internet tends to be a la carte, however – rather than a recap show of the issues of the day like a TV or radio show, Internet news sites will usually allow the browser to find the one story they are interested in and watch a video strictly on that, even if said video might have been a segment of a larger show. Internet native news shows do exist such as Vice News, but they tend to seep elsewhere: Vice News ran a broadcast on HBO for a few years despite starting as a YouTube channel, for example, eventually transferring the show to their own network called Viceland and later Vice On TV.[2]

Outside the realm of traditional news organizations with paid journalists are citizen journalists, independents who report on their own and use sites such as YouTube to display their content. Independents also heavily cover commentary on news: while most independents cannot originally report on anything other than local issues due to budgetary concerns, opinions are cheaper. As such, Internet journalism has many video broadcasts & podcasts of opinion closer to the talk radio model. Hyper-local news is also more feasible on the Internet: issues such as school board meetings streamed on video, town parades, and so on.[3]

History

A sample section of a news broadcast by
Pentagon News

Silent news films were shown in cinemas from the late 19th century.[4] In 1909 Pathé started producing weekly newsreels in Europe.[4] Pathé began producing newsreels for the UK in 1910 and the US in 1911.[4]

News broadcasts in the United States were initially transmitted over the radio. NBC began broadcasts in November 1926, with CBS entering production on September 25, 1927.[5] Both initially discussed similar topics, such as election results, presidential inaugurations, and other matters of concern to the general public. However, NBC soon emerged as the dominant force for entertainment talent. In response, CBS President William S Paley focused on giving CBS Radio an upscale reputation with better news as well as commentary programs with well-regarded hosts such as Lowell Thomas.[6] Both broadcasters faced stiff competition from the newspapers. The outbreak of World War II led to a great increase in the quantity of news programming, consuming as much as 20% of the schedules of the major networks.[6] Chief among these reporters was Edward Roscoe Murrow, whose reports from London kept the American public focused on a war far from home.[7] Also, the eventual "big three" were complete in 1945; the FCC forced a sale of NBC Blue due to anti-trust concerns, and the newly independent unit was renamed ABC (American Broadcasting Company).

A general shift over time happened in the style of the evening newscasts in most countries. In the 1950s, television was novel enough that it was considered entertainment. In the 1960s and 70s, television newscasts tended to be unusually "serious" by later standards, featuring more "hard news" and less light entertainment mixed in.[8] The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite is one famous example, although similar styles took place on the BBC in the United Kingdom, on shows in the Eastern Bloc, and so on, with high viewership concentrated in just a few prestige newscasts. This was something of an artifact of both technology and media culture: few channels were available, and those that did tended to take news casting seriously, even if lighter news could potentially have gotten more viewers.[8] Government regulation also affected the news landscape: in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission forced networks to abide by strict public-interest requirements that required broadcasting news, while television in the Soviet Union was strictly regulated by the government which looked on frivolous topics with disfavor. In the 1980s and 90s, this tended to fall away as a consequence of cable and satellite technology allowing a more fragmented market and government reluctance to interfere as closely. Increased choice in channels led to viewers declining to watch overly serious newscasts; successful network news shows tended to be ones that either focused on entertainment or at least mixed it in, such as morning talk shows or news magazines such as Today and 60 Minutes.[9] Audiences that prefer more serious news have migrated to news-focused stations such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC for American examples.[9] These changes have been criticized as having effects on larger society. An example from television in Italy is a study of Mediaset's rollout in Italy in the 1980s found that Mediaset's programming was slanted against news and educational content than its competitor RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana). A study in 2019 found that individuals in regions with an earlier rollout of Mediaset were more susceptible to populist appeals and less interested in "sophisticated" political arguments.[10] The study said the effect included populist parties in general that offered simple slogans and easy cure-alls, including non-Berlusconi populist parties such as the Five Star Movement.[11]

From 2000 to 2010, overall viewership of television broadcast news continued to decline. Some news-adjacent cable programs gained fame and success in this era (such as the comedy-focused The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and the commentary-focused The O'Reilly Factor). However, their gains did not offset the continuing steep decline in viewership of mainline network news.[12] This era saw diversification and fragmentation proceed even further as new niche networks gained prominence such as the business-focused CNBC, Bloomberg Television, and Fox Business. Instead, people used the Internet for news rather than television broadcasts, both in mainline sites such as ones runs by newspapers as well as independent blogs and message boards with other Internet-users sharing opinions and news[12] Internet news, while a competitor, tended not to use live broadcast as a style, except when streaming existing television programs. Another change in news broadcasts in the 2000s, at least in the United States, was a rediscovered interest in health news and consumer news – areas of special interest to women that had traditionally been written off as too minor for the evening newscasts, but proved to be steady sources of viewer curiosity and ratings.[12]

News broadcasting by country

Canada

Terrestrial television

Unlike in the United States, most Canadian television stations have license requirements (enforced by the

The National, these were expanded to a half-hour and moved to 11:00 p.m. during the fall of 2012).[citation needed
]

Some stations carry morning newscasts (usually starting at 5:30 or 6:00 am, and ending at 9:00 am). Unlike in the United States, primetime newscasts in the 10:00 p.m. timeslot are relatively uncommon (three Global owned-and-operated stations in Manitoba and SaskatchewanCKND-DT, CFSK-DT, and CFRE-DT – and Victoria, British Columbia independent station CHEK-DT are the only television stations in the country carrying a primetime newscast); conversely, pre-5:00 a.m. local newscasts do not exist in Canada.[citation needed]

Like with U.S. television, many stations use varied titles for their newscasts; this is particularly true with owned-and-operated stations of Global and

City (Global's stations use titles based on daypart such as News Hour for the noon and early evening newscasts and News Final for 11:00 p.m. newscasts, while all six City-owned broadcast stations produce morning news/talk programs under the umbrella title Breakfast Television and its flagship station CITY-DT/Toronto's evening newscasts are titled CityNews). Overall umbrella titles for news programming use the titling schemes "(Network or system name) News" for network-owned stations or "(Callsign) News" for affiliates not directly owned by a network or television system (although the latter title scheme was used on some network-owned stations prior to the early 2000s).[citation needed
]

CBC Television, Global, and CTV each produce national evening newscasts (The National,

W5 (aired since 1966 and currently the longest-running network newsmagazine in Canada).[citation needed
]

CTV's

Question Period; Global would eventually debut the political affairs show The West Block
in November 2011.

Specialty television

Canada is host to several 24-hour news channels on specialty television, including

CTV News Channel in English, and Ici RDI and Le Canal Nouvelles (LCN) in French. BNN Bloomberg operates as a financial news channel, while Sun News Network briefly operated from 2011 to 2015 as a conservative-leaning competitor to the other national news channels. There are also a handful of regional news channels, such as CP24 (which covers the Greater Toronto Area), and Global News: BC 1, which covers Vancouver. CityNews Channel
formerly operated as a competitor to CP24, although that channel shut down after a year and a half of operation in May 2013

The U.S. CNN, Fox News, HLN, and MSNBC, as well as a number of other international news channels (such as, most commonly,

CRTC
.

United States

Broadcast television

Local newscasts

Local TV stations in the United States normally broadcast local news three to four times a day on average: commonly airing at 4:30, 5:00, 5:30, or 6:00 a.m.; noon; 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. in the early evening; and 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. Some stations carry morning newscasts at 4:00, 7:00, 8:00, or 9:00 a.m., midday newscasts at 11:00 or 11:30 a.m., late afternoon newscasts at 4:00 or 4:30 p.m., or early evening newscasts at 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. Many Fox affiliates, affiliates of minor networks (such as The CW and MyNetworkTV), and independent stations air newscasts in the final hour of primetime (i.e., 10:00 p.m. in the Eastern and Pacific time zones or 9:00 p.m. in the Mountain and Central time zones in the U.S.). Stations that produce local newscasts typically broadcast as little as one to as much over twelve hours of local news on weekdays and as little as one hour to as much as seven hours on weekends; news programming on weekends are typically limited to morning and evening newscasts as the variable scheduling of network sports programming (if a station is affiliated with a network with a sports division) usually prevents most stations from carrying midday newscasts (however a few stations located in the Eastern and Pacific time zones do produce weekend midday newscasts).[citation needed]

From the 1940s to the 1960s, broadcast television stations typically provided local news programs only one to two times each evening for 15 minutes (the normal length for many locally produced programs at the time); usually these programs aired as supplements to network-supplied evening news programs or leadouts for primetime programming. Reports featured on local and national television newscasts during this time were generally provided via film or still photography; eventually, videotape began to be used to provide live coverage of news events. The 1950s also saw the first use of airborne newsgathering; most notably, in 1958, Los Angeles television station KTLA began operating the "Telecopter", a helicopter equipped for newsgathering use that was the most advanced airborne television broadcast device of its time.[citation needed]

The modern-day coverage of major breaking news events came to fruition following the

WFAA-TV and CBS News provided continuous coverage of the events and aftermath for five days. The November 24, 1963, assassination of Kennedy's accused killer Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby was fed to NBC by a remote unit on loan to its Dallas affiliate WBAP-TV (now KXAS-TV) from competitor KTVT, and was the first murder to have been witnessed live on U.S. network television. The coverage provided by the local stations eventually led to further investments and technological developments to provide real-time news; newsgathering vehicles equipped with satellites began to be used on the local and national levels beginning in the 1970s. During the 1960s and 1970s, many stations began to provide additional news programming, beginning with midday news programs; in the late 1970s, the first local morning news programs debuted.[citation needed
]

Additional changes in local news content came during the 1980s and 1990s; in January 1989,

independent station WXPO-TV when it signed on in 1969), in which supplementary 30-second long news updates were produced at or near the top of each hour outside regular long-form newscasts during local commercial break inserts shown within network and syndicated programming. The format spread to other U.S. television stations (most notably, WISH-TV in Indianapolis, one of the few remaining users of the concept), most of which eventually disposed of the hourly update format by the early 2000s.[citation needed
]

Since the early 1990s, independent stations and stations affiliated with a non-

Big Three network have entered into "news share agreements", in which news production is outsourced to a major network station (usually an affiliate of ABC, NBC, or CBS), often to avoid shouldering the cost of starting a news department from scratch or because of a lack of studio space. These commonly involve Fox, CW, and MyNetworkTV affiliates (and previously affiliate stations of the now-defunct predecessors of the latter two networks, The WB and UPN) and in some cases, independent stations; however such agreements exist in certain markets between two co-owned/co-managed Big Three affiliates. News share agreements are most common with stations co-owned with a larger network affiliate or whose operations are jointly managed through a shared service or local marketing agreement. In cases where a station with an existing news department enters into a news share agreement, it will result either the two departments merging or the outright conversion of newscast production from in-house to outsourced production. Minor network affiliates involved in news share agreements will often carry far fewer hours of local newscasts than would be conceivable with an in-house news department to avoid competition with the outsourcing partner's own newscasts, as a result, minor network affiliates involved in these NSAs often will carry a morning newscast from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. (in competition with the national network newscasts instead of airing competing with the Big Three affiliates' newscasts) or a primetime newscast at 10:00 pm. Eastern and Pacific or 9:00 pm. Central and Mountain Time, with limited to no newscasts in other traditional news time periods (midday, late afternoon, or early evening).[citation needed
]

Because of the increased presence of duopolies and outsourcing agreements since the early 2000s, the number of minor network affiliates and independent stations that produce their own newscasts has markedly decreased compared to when duopolies were barred under Federal Communications Commission rules prior to 2000 (as of 2013, there are at least 15 minor network affiliates or independent stations that produce their own local newscasts, most are located within the 20 largest U.S. media markets). Duopolies and outsourcing agreements have also affected Fox stations in a similar manner; although Fox is considered to be a major network on the same level as NBC, ABC, and CBS and has urged its affiliates since the early 1990s to broadcast local news, about half of its stations broadcast local news programming through news share agreements with many of the remainder operating their own news departments. Several stations affiliated with Spanish-language networks (such as Univision, Telemundo, and UniMás) or also broadcast their own newscasts, these stations often produce a substantially lower weekly newscast output compared to its English-language counterparts (usually limited to half-hour broadcasts in the evening, and often airing only on weeknights).[citation needed]

Unlike international broadcast stations which tend to brand under uniform newscast titles based solely on network affiliation, U.S. television stations tend to use varying umbrella titles for their newscasts; some title their newscasts using the station's on-air branding (such as combining the network affiliation and channel number with the word "News"), others use franchised brand names (like

Nielsen ratings credit.[citation needed
]

Network world news programs

The Big Three broadcast television networks produce morning and evening national newscasts. These newscasts are focused on world news, national news, and sometimes local news items that have some national significance. (

]

Network morning newscasts usually air at 7:00 a.m. (English-language network morning shows air live in the Eastern Time Zone and tape delayed for the remaining time zones, while the Spanish-language morning shows air live in the Eastern, Central, and Mountain time zones and are tape delayed in the Pacific Time Zone); network evening newscasts usually are broadcast live twice, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time/5:30 p.m. Central time for the East Coast before another "Western Edition" live broadcast at 6:30 p.m. Pacific time/7:30 p.m. Mountain time. Today was the first morning news program to be broadcast on American television and in the world, when it debuted on January 14, 1952; the earliest national evening news program was The Walter Compton News, a short-lived 15-minute newscast that aired on the DuMont Television Network from 1947 to 1948.[citation needed]

All four major English networks and the two largest Spanish networks also carry

Up to the Minute and World News Now, respectively; NBC previously produced overnight newscasts at different times, both of which have since been cancelled: NBC News Overnight from 1982 to 1983, and NBC Nightside from 1991 to 1998 (NBC currently does not offer a late night newscast, although the network currently airs rebroadcasts of the fourth hour of Today, and sister network CNBC's Mad Money on weeknights).[citation needed
]

Spanish-language news programs are provided by

Al Rojo Vivo; Estrella TV, which produces the weekday-only flagship news program Noticiero Estrella TV and the primetime newscast Cierre de Edición; and Azteca América, which produces morning, early and late evening newscasts on weekdays under the umbrella title Hechos. In the cases of Univision and Telemundo, both of their evening news programs compete with national evening news programs on their English-language competitors.[citation needed
]

Fox, The CW, and MyNetworkTV do not produce national morning and evening news programs (although Fox made a brief attempt at a morning program from 1996 to 1997 with

Fox After Breakfast; many CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates and independent stations air the syndicated news program The Daily Buzz, while some Tribune Broadcasting-owned CW and MyNetworkTV stations air a similar program called EyeOpener).[citation needed
]

Cable television

Big Three; CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.[14]

Conversely, several cable news channels exist that carry news reports specifically geared toward a particular metropolitan area, region, or state such as New York City's

NewsChannel 8. These channels are usually owned by a local cable operator and are distributed solely through cable television and IPTV system operators. Some broadcast television stations also operate cable channels (some of which are repeated through digital multicasting) that air the station's local newscasts in the form of live simulcasts from the television station, with rebroadcasts of the newscasts airing in time periods between the live broadcasts.[citation needed
]

A term which has entered common parlance to differentiate cable news from traditional news broadcasts is network news, in reference to the traditional television networks on which such broadcasts air. A classic example is the cable news channel MSNBC, which overlaps with (and, in the case of very significant breaking news events, pre-empts) its network counterpart

controversially perceived conservative-leaning political content that differs from the Fox broadcast stations' independent and generally nonpartisan reporting. Most U.S. cable news networks do not air news programming 24 hours a day, often filling late afternoon, primetime, and late night hours with news-based talk programs, documentaries, and other specialty programming.[citation needed
]

Radio

More often,

ABC News Radio, or a mix of both local and national content, including weather and traffic reports. Some stations also air a two-minute report at the bottom of the hour.[citation needed
]

FM stations, unless they feature a talk radio format, usually only air an abbreviated weather forecast. Some also air minute-long news capsules featuring a quick review of events, and usually only in drive time periods or in critical emergencies, since FM stations usually focus more on playing music. Traffic reports also air on FM stations, depending on the market.[citation needed]

In some countries, radio news content may be syndicated by a website or company to many stations in a particular region or even the entire country. A notable example is Israel, where there are groups of radio stations that broadcast the same hourly news capsule by an Israeli news website and television station. There are currently two groups of local Israeli stations: one broadcasts news from

Kol Israel stations broadcast theirs.[citation needed
]

See also

References

  1. ^ Sterling, Christopher. Encyclopedia of Radio p. 1097.
  2. ^ Viceland, Still Struggling After Four Years, Quietly Changes Its Name to Vice TV
  3. ^ Miller, Claire Cain; Stone, Brad (April 12, 2009). "Hyperlocal Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers". The New York Times. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  4. ^ .
  5. ^ "The Museum of Broadcast Communications – Encyclopedia of Television – News Network". www.museum.tv. Retrieved October 21, 2018.
  6. ^ a b Ponce de Leon 2015, pp. 23–25.
  7. ^ "A Brief Look at the History of Broadcast Journalism". Student Resources. April 1, 2015. Retrieved October 21, 2018.
  8. ^ a b Ponce de Leon 2015, pp. 7–12.
  9. ^ a b Ponce de Leon 2015, pp. 12–14.
  10. ISSN 0002-8282
    .
  11. ^ "How trashy TV made children dumber and enabled a wave of populist leaders". The Washington Post. July 20, 2019. Archived from the original on May 26, 2023.
  12. ^ a b c Ponce de Leon 2015, pp. 259–263.
  13. ^ Hughes, Lain. "CNN". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  14. ^ Barr, Jeremy (May 24, 2021). "Can cable news win over young viewers? At MSNBC, a 40-year-old new president is going to try". The Washington Post.

Bibliography

  • Ponce de Leon, Charles (2015). That's the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America. University of Chicago Press. .

Further reading

  • Kierstead, Phillip. "News, Network." The Museum of Broadcast Communications – Encyclopedia of Television – News Network, The Museum of Broadcast Communications, www.museum.tv/eotv/newsnetwork.htm.
  • "A Brief Look at the History of Broadcast Journalism." Student Resources, New York Film Academy, April 1, 2015, www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/history-of-broadcast-journalism/.