Inside the media industry you hear the term news judgment bandied about a lot. It is an ephemeral concept born by PR practitioners, journalists, sub editors and editors; it surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the industry together.
It is the force that makes a press officer wary of a journalist’s question; it makes the journalist ask another and sends the sub and editor into a state of mediatic ecstasy.
I do not want to be denounced as a heretic and have my media career burned at the stake, but between you and me:
I no longer believe in news judgmentt.
I once did. Four years working in the busiest press office in Europe, the Press Bureau in New Scotland Yard, does impart some kind of perspective on news, but increasingly I doubt it is a universal sense of judgment.
Online news can be blamed for this paradigm shift: I no longer buy newspapers, am seldom home at 6pm to watch the TV and so rely solely on the internet for news. At first I noticed no difference, on all of the major New Zealand news websites the content is exactly the same as traditional news anyway.
But recently, particularly now I have been cast adrift from traditional media for so long, I have run into a divergence in the force.
Every morning I routinely scan headlines and click to read the ones I judge worth it. The problem arises when, during my day, I happen to glance at the front page of a ubiquitous mewspaper lying around the office.
Too often I am shocked at the story the editor has decided to put on the front page. The front page story is the news his or her (mainly his) news judgement has deemed to be the most important of the day.
It is never the story I judged to be the most important and it hasn’t been for some time.