Note: All terms in red are index terms from the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Machine Learning; assuming that the index terms have remained the same, these can be used as links within the new Encyclopedia. If the list of entries has grown, of course additional links can be made. (I assume this will be modified during the processing of this chapter).
DefinitionNews is "the communication of selected information on current events", where the selection is guided by "newsworthiness" or "what interests the public". News are also stories, from which the reader usually expects answers to the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why, to which a "how" is often added. News-style writing -as opposed to, for example, commentary writing -generally strives for objectivity and/or neutrality (the representation of different views on the event).In this content-centric sense, news can be written/authored and published by professional journalists and news outlets (such as newspapers or radio or TV stations), but also by anyone else and in any other form, often called citizen journalism: "an alternative and activist form of newsgathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism." (Radsch, 2013, p. 159). However, news, or mainstream(-media) news, is also often thought of in a source-centric way: reports authored by professional journalists in mainstream media institutions, as opposed to reporting from citizen journalists (or anyone else) who generally publish on the Web, in the form of blogs with a certain form of periodicity.