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Breaking news
Breaking news is a current event that broadcasters feel warrants the
interruption of scheduled programming in order to report its details. Its
use is often loosely assigned to the most significant story of the moment or
a story that is being covered live. It could be a story that is simply of
wide interest to viewers and has little impact otherwise.
Format
The format of a special report or breaking news even commonly consists of an
opening graphic, featuring music which adds an emphasis on the importance of
the event. This is usually followed with the introduction of a news anchor,
who welcomes the viewer to the broadcast and introduces the story at hand.
Once the story is introduced, the network may choose to continue to show a
live shot of the anchor or may cut away to video or images of the story that
is being followed during the broadcast. Additionally, the coverage may be
passed to a reporter at the location of the breaking event, possibly sharing
more information about the story as it breaks.
Depending upon the story being followed, the report may last only a few
minutes, or continue for multiple hours at a time. If coverage continues for
an extended amount of time, the network may integrate analysis about the
story through analysts in-studio, via. phone, satellite, or through other
means of communication.
When the coverage comes to a close, the network may either resume
programming that was occurring prior to the event or begin new programming,
depending upon the amount of time spent on the coverage.
Usage
While in the past programming interruptions were restricted to extremely
urgent news, such breaks are now common at 24-hour news channels which may
have an anchor available for live interruption at any time. Some networks,
such as Sky News, largely emphasize this, even advertising the station as
being "first for breaking news".
The term breaking news has come to replace the older use of news bulletin.
There has been widespread use of breaking news at the local level,
particularly when one station in a market wants to emphasize the exclusivity
of coverage. Not all viewers agree that stories assigned breaking news rise
to the significance or level of interest that warrant such a designation.
Criticism
When a network begins coverage of a breaking story, the early details about
the stories are commonly sketchy, usually due to the limited amount of
resources available to the reporters for information during the time the
story initially breaks. An example of this was during the Sago Mine
disaster, in which the initial reports were that the 12 miners were found
alive, but the network later found only one actually survived.
Another criticism has been the diluting of the importance of breaking news
by the need of 24-hour news channels to fill time, using the title when
covering any number of soft news stores, one example being car chases.
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Current News: a dictionary of current search terms and popular interest topics.