🔶 #21: "What is news?" + A special offer.

Hello and welcome back to the News Alchemists newsletter!

Last week, I opened this email with a question: What is journalism?

Only a few hours after, I came across a new research study by the Pew Research Center titled: What is news? –– That's some timing!

The study explores "how Americans decide what ‘news’ means to them – and how it fits into their lives in the digital era" – and of course as soon as I started reading it, I was hooked.

(Nieman Lab published a short summary.)

I want to unpack a few findings with you but, before I go any further, two disclaimers.

First of all, the study is the result of surveying and interviewing people in the US only. It's not representative of people's views across the world, and results may well be very different if the same study was done in other countries. For this reason, I'm using it only as a good prompt for important conversations we all should have.

Secondly, words matter: the study asks what is news, which is not exactly the same as asking what is journalism. We often misuse the two words as synonyms, but they are not.

(For what it's worth: in my view, news is a subset of journalism. Most news is journalism – at least from a traditional point of view – while a lot of journalism is not news.)

The study touches upon what topics and what sources are considered news, and what is and isn't news on social media, but the part I'm interested in is the section that examines how people feel about the news.