Journalism, History Of
Some form of "news packaging," defined as tailoring news for sale, has likely existed since the first newspapers were published. This entry, however, examines the history of journalism in terms of four basic American eras: the 1830s, the Civil War era, the Watergate era, and the 1980s and beyond. News packaging (not to be confused with distribution techniques of print media) has three crucial definitional elements:
- arrangement of news in formats to make it more appealing, accessible, and readily available while facilitating the ability of consumers to "make sense of" it—that is, making news easier to grasp, absorb, digest, understand, and use,
- efforts to market news as a product, and
- the notion of news as a commodity.
When the term "packaging" was first used in this sense is not clear, but a 1971 book by James Aronson may have been the first with the concept in the title: Packaging the News: A Critical Survey of Press, Radio and Television. Since the late 1980s, the term has been widely used, but it must be distinguished from "framing"—also used increasingly interchangeably with "packaging." Framing, however, instead of referring to overt efforts to sell news, concerns how the "packaging" or "framing" of subjects in news accounts shapes the way in which people think about events and issues.
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