At its core, news is defined by what’s considered newsworthy, a criterion that has evolved over time. Traditionally, a story is deemed newsworthy if it’s unusual, as encapsulated by Jesse Lynch Williams’ adage "a dog bites a man, that's a story; a man bites a dog, that's a good 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.
As with other kinds of news, newsworthiness is the essential element of health and science coverage. Along with the factors that generally influence newsworthiness, Boyce Rensberger, in A Field Guide for Science Writers, identifies four factors specific to science stories:
Recommendation is where the role of algorithms is most visible to the public.
Generative AI is what we call AI systems that can generate things like images, video, voice and text. They do this by first encoding many examples of the kind of content they’re going to make, then decoding to make something new.
The music industry is a driven by economics, technology, gatekeepers and the ever-evolving ways people discover and consume music. Understanding these features is crucial to understanding the music itself and its impact.
Where all media communicate through rules of notice, interactive media are fundamentally defined by their structural possibilities – what might be called "rules of action " – which significantly influence how users communicate and behave.
At its core, a game is constructed from several essential components: a defined Goal (the end state players are trying to reach), Rules (the formal structure establishing what can and cannot be done), Obstacles (elements preventing easy goal achievement) and a Core Dynamic, "the main action of a game, what the player does most of the time in order to reach their goal(s)."[1]
The video game industry has evolved from a niche entertainment market into a dominant global force, surpassing the combined revenue of the film and music industries. This evolution has been marked by radical shifts in how games are published, monetized and consumed, creating both unprecedented opportunities for creators and significant challenges for players.
Historically, broadcast media followed a hierarchical model where a small elite group of wealthy producers shaped the public sphere and sent one-way communication to a much larger mass of receivers, often promoting views favorable to the status quo.