News
News is the information mainly about current events. It is provided by different media such as newspapers, news channels, postal systems, word of mouth, and electronic media. Some news is also called “hard news” to differentiate it from “soft news”. The English word “News” came in the 14th century after the plural of the word “new”.Although there are beliefs that “NEWS” is an acronym for “North East West South” or “Notable Events, Weather and Sports” but this belief hasn’t been backed by any shreds of evidence yet.
The exchange of news may be one of the oldest human activities. We have always heard about messengers in the earlier times going from one place to another to gather some news or to make an announcement. The need to know about ongoing news helped to attract people to crossroads, marketplaces and campfires, it motivated travellers, helped journeyers. In the preliterate world, a general question for a traveller used to be “What’s new?. The preliterate people were mostly informed about their immediate neighbours as compared to today’s suburban population. This fascination with the news was quite evident in the Greek and Roman era where to spread and store the spoken news, daily handwritten notes were issued, first posted by Julian Caesar.
Common topics for news are political, sports, war, government, education, health, economy, business, fashion, entertainment and other quirky, unusual, or bizarre events. Government decrees including taxes, laws, policies, criminals, public health have been in news since ancient times. With the development in technology and science, they started influencing the way news was being spread and thus became a part of its content too.
News has seen a journey of being spread firstly as word of mouth then via messengers through hand written notes to newspapers being printed. After that came the era of technology development which first took the news to the radio then television and finally having all news available at one click on our smartphones. Nowadays, different apps are available in mobile phones curated for various genres of news and entertaining its customer choices.
The most common genre for the spread of news is: newspaper, which can be printed or digital. In earlier times, newspapers were published mostly by the rebels of society who used it to aware people of their concerning changes in the surroundings and were praised for this form of social work but nowadays, it is believed that spreading the news (journalism) has remained merely as a business where news agencies advertise, sell, or print news in a way to make the most profit and are no longer subjective to the social cause it once was popular for.