News is a story about what happened

“I would argue that news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.

We take today’s front page as a mirror of yesterday’s events, but it was made up yesterday evening — literally, by ‘make-up’ editors, who designed page one according to arbitrary conventions: lead story on the far right column, off-lead on the left, soft news inside or below the fold, features set off by special kinds of headlines.

Typographical design orients the reader and shapes the meaning of the news. News itself takes the form of narratives composed by professionals according to conventions that they picked up in the course of their training — the ‘inverted pyramid’ mode of exposition, the ‘color’ lead, the code for ‘high’ and ‘the highest’ sources, and so on.

News is not what happened but a story about what happened.”

[Robert Darnton, Harvard University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard; quoted from The Library in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10, 12 June 2008.]