News

News is the communication of selected information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience.

Etymology

One theory is that news developed as a special use of the plural form of new in the 14th century. In Middle English, the equivalent word was newes, like the French nouvelles and the German neues. Somewhat similar developments are found in some of the Slavic languages (Czech and Slovak), where there exists a word noviny ("news"), developed from the word nový ("new"), and in the Celtic languages Welsh and Cornish, where there are the words newyddion and nowodhow, respectively from W. newydd and C. nowydh.

A folk etymology suggests that it is an acronym of the cardinal directions: north, east, west, and south.

History of news reporting

In its infancy, new gathering was primitive by today's standards. Printed news had to be phoned in to a newsroom or brought there by a reporter, where it was typed and either transmitted over wire services or edited and manually set in type along with other news stories for a specific edition. Today, the term "breaking news" has become trite as broadcast and cable news services use live satellite technology to bring current events into consumers' homes live as they happen. Events that used to take hours or days to become common knowledge in towns or in nations are fed instantaneously to consumers via radio, television, mobile phone, and the Internet.