News Around the World

Pamela J. Shoemaker

What’s news? A front-page news story in the United States might not appear in a newspaper in China. Or a minor story on German television may be all over the airwaves in India. But News Around the World shows that the underlying nature of news is much the same the world over and that people — no matter what their jobs or their status in society — tend to hold similar notions of newsworthiness. In this richly detailed study of international news, news makers and the audience, the authors have undertaken exhaustive original research within two cities — one major and one peripheral — in each of ten countries: Australia, Chile, China, Germany, India, Israel, Jordan, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. The nations were selected for study based on a central principle of maximizing variation in geographic locations, economic and political systems, languages, sizes, and cultures.