Hard news and soft news

There have two types of news story; they are hard news and soft news. Hard new generally refers to up-to-the-minute news and events that are reported immediately, while soft news is background information or human-interest stories. The topic of the soft news is not very serious. The hard news contains Politics, war, economics and crime, and the soft news is arts, entertainment and lifestyles.

Hard news has the following three characteristics: it directly relates to people vital interests and the survival of people; for personal development, people do everything possible to understand it; it has strong timing, expired news is completely worthless. So in the dissemination of information it should mainly based on hard news.

Soft news can be developed greatly by the changing of people’s life. People like celebrity gossip rather than policy news. At the same time, the soft news could gain a lot of advertising revenue and it could bring profit to the media company. However the hard news mostly about what happened of the society and the society cannot live without hard news.

Reference:
Bob, F., Martin, H., Mark, H., Marie, K. & John, E. R. (2005:66), Key Concepts in Journalism Studies, S AGE, London

Bob, F., Martin, H., Mark, H., Marie, K. & John, E. R. (2005:85), Key Concepts in Journalism Studies, S AGE, London

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