To counteract the structural biases and sensationalist tropes that currently dominate crime coverage, newsrooms must deliberately shift their practices toward accountability, context and the humanization of those affected. Improving crime reporting requires journalists to articulate a new journalistic purpose and prioritize structural analysis over episodic details.
Journalism & News
The creation of ‘crime news’ is “invariably the result of a long process of selection where the raw material is sifted, shaped, edited and recreated.” The choices made during this process often prioritize ease of production, drama and law enforcement narratives.
Crime news employs specific narrative frameworks to simplify complex issues, often resulting in biased and stigmatizing portrayals.
Crime news is a highly developed sub-genre that reflects organizational priorities, audience preferences and systemic biases. This is because “the news media does not cover systematically all forms and expressions of crime and victimizations. It emphasizes some crimes and ignores other crimes. It sympathizes with some victims while blaming other victims.”
With news, more than perhaps any other kind of source, it’s important follow both steps in the information sorting process: companion reading first, to find out if a source is worth paying attention to, then close reading to make sure you’re getting the whole story.
Journalism is guided by a set of norms that reflect its aspirational role in society, though these norms are constantly debated and challenged. There are standard practices that guide how the industry works.
Tropes in news function as shorthand for audiences, allowing for more efficient narrative construction and reducing cognitive load, often at the cost of flattening complex realities.
While young people use and engage with news differently from older generations, they continue to value concepts such as trustworthiness and fairness.
The Close Reading Genre workshop trains teachers to use genre as a tool to help students engage with media. It explores how genres can be identified and analyzed through their characteristics, tropes and industry practices and demonstrates how this can be done with key genres such as advertising and news.
The Close Reading Media workshop prepares educators to teach students how to analyze and evaluate the "rules of notice" that media makers use to draw and direct audiences' attention, how media works are framed, and how we all apply our own point of view when consuming media.