Whenever we hear the term “Breaking News” a sense of urgency hits our brain. Suddenly we start paying more attention. This is nothing unusual for the human brain. Our brain responds to unusual things or events at a faster pace than it does to normal events. The visual and print media tries to make the best out of these two words mainly to catch the attention of the viewers.
One of the prime sources of such news is the TV channels. TV channels are the leading visual medium to announce such news from time to time. Mostly, these news stories appear on a scroll when the news is not being telecast. During the news hour, alongside the scroll the news telecast as breaking news is also given more time and detailed reporting. But, some TV channels exaggerate the importance of a story and covers lesser important stories as the breaking news. At times when there is nothing special to broadcast, some TV channels broadcasts the general events or stories as breaking news just to grab the attention of the viewers. The strategy may work for them in the short run but in the long run it’s almost certain that they are going to lose viewership. This will happen as they are cheating with their viewers by covering lesser important events labeled as breaking news.
There are also a lot of websites online that offer such news. But, can you trust the authenticity of the news stories provided by these sites? Surely, you can’t trust them all. Only the reputed websites offer real and informative stories. So, you need to know the characteristics of a reputed news site in order to get informative news. There are also websites that may offer real and informative stories but are not good in terms of choosing the right story to cover as the breaking news. These websites consider almost any story as the breaking news and thus confuses the visitors. At one point, it turns out to be a daunting task for the website to catch the attention of the visitors towards important news stories. This happens when the visitors think that they are being cheated and offered general news in an exaggerated manner. In this way, websites loses visitors.
So, both the television channels and the websites need to be sensible in terms of broadcasting news. They should not misinterpret the gravity of news stories and confuse the visitors. In spite, these news sources should concentrate on conveying informative news and term only the significant stories as “Breaking News”. If the media acts professionally then the ultimate goal of conveying information to the mass people can be achieved.
