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The news net

Posted by ESC on June 13, 2003

In Reply to: The news net posted by Mei on June 12, 2003

: Hi,

: I don't understand what the bracketed sentences mean? Please do me a favor.

: Tuchman's study, which draws on data gathered by participant observation and interviews with newsworkers over a ten year period in the USA, documents how news organization disperse a news net that interwines time and space in such a way as to allow for the identification of 'newsworthy' events. If the news net is intended for 'big fish', as she argues, (then at stake in conceptual terms is the task of unravelling this 'arrangement of intersecting fine mesh (the stingers), tensile strength (the reporters), and steel links (the wire services) supposedly providing a news blanket, ensuring that all potnetial news will be found.') That is to say, the bureaucratic threads of the news net are kintted together so as to frame certain preferred types of occurrences as 'news events' while, concurrently, ensuring that others slip through unremarked.

: Thanks a lot.

: Mei

(then at stake in conceptual terms is the task of unravelling this 'arrangement of intersecting fine mesh (the stingers), tensile strength (the reporters), and steel links (the wire services)

The phrase is addressing the different levels of newsgathering -- community > area > national:
1. STRINGERS (not stingers). The term as used here refers to free-lance writers who gather news within their own small communities. They aren't newspaper employees but are paid per article. A stringer might be a housewife who gathers community news, births and deaths, club meetings, who is visiting their children in another state, school news, etc.
2. REPORTERS. They are newspaper employees and gather news from a broader area -- citywide, countywide, statewide. News about government, etc.
3. WIRE SERVICES. Services like the Associated Press gather news from their members and distribute it on a nationwide basis.

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