Journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant. Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. According to Journalism.org, for its own survival, journalism must balance what readers know they want, with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society. To make important news stories interesting to audiences, one must write the piece as a great story with human experience intertwined in it.
Storytelling and information are not contradictory. The Neiman report explains that they are better understood as two points on a continuum of communication... Most journalism, like most communication, exists in the middle. The journalists’ task is to find the way to make the significant interesting for each story and finding the right mix of the serious and the less serious that offers an account of the day. Journalism is an art of making potentially boring, but important topics interesting and appealing to readers.
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