News and Gossip

News is what people need to know.
Gossip is what people want to know.

   There's plenty of room in the information business for purveyors of each -- news and gossip -- but there's often a thin, even movable, line between the two. And to make things even more challenging, there's a lot of overlap. What's news to one is mere gossip to another.
   To add to the fun, many people confuse the two, insisting that they desperately need to know who's having an extra-marital affair with whom, or whether Kim Kardashian is pregnant and if so by whom, or how much your second cousin's niece paid for her full-back tattoo.
   And when it comes to political journalism, there's often a mash-up of the two types of information.
   Granted, a little gossip can spice up a straight and potentially dull news item, and reporters sometimes do that, using a human angle, humor, sorrow, joy, pity or any other emotion to engage readers and viewers.
   Gossip is easy to acquire and spread. Real news takes work. Or, as one editor put it, "Don't just cover the news. Uncover the news."
   It's easy to cover the flash and dash, but it's much harder to find the cause of the flash and why people dash toward or away from the flashy.

   Journalists are information watchdogs. They sniff out problems, dig up details, and alert the rest of us to what we as citizens and voters need to know.
   At their best, they do it well, in the process filtering the news from the gossip, and presenting the more important bits of information to the public, regardless of what politicians, candidates, government or corporate officials may prefer. The core of journalism's responsibility is to separate out marketing, advertising, propaganda, insinuations, half-truths and lies, label them as such and back up the news stories with fact. 
  And when criticized and attacked by activists on both sides of an issue, that's proof they did a good job.