What Sells the News?
Now ask students: How do they think news outlets make money?
- Explain that most news sources make money in one of three ways: from selling single copies of print newspapers, from subscriptions (people pay to access the website or to have a copy of the newspaper delivered every day) and from advertising.
- That means that news outlets have to appeal to their audiences: they need to convince people to pay to read them, and to convince businesses that their ads will reach the right audience.
Explain that news outlets have three different ways of appealing to audiences:
They can be fun and entertaining
They be accurate and give you lots of facts so that you feel well-informed, and
They can make you root for your side—whether that’s a sports team, your country, your identity (Star Wars fan, cat person, K-pop lover, etc.), your political beliefs, and so on.
Have students access the student chapter What Sells the News? and ask students to complete the three Multimedia Choice questions:
Based on these front pages, which of these newspapers wants to entertain you? (The Weekly World News – they don’t even expect you to believe this story is real; it’s just funny.)
Which one wants to make you feel well-informed? (The New York Times – it has stories on lots of different topics, with lots of facts just on the front page.)
Which one wants you to root for a “team”? (The New York Post —it even describes a 1-1 tie as a “win” for the US team.)
Explain to students that most outlets offer a mix of those three things. That mix is the outlet’s selling point.
The reason that a news outlet (or any other product) gives for you to buy it.