In Other News: Negotiating a Shifting Notion of Newsworthiness Through Amateur Web Video

Abstract

This paper attempts to open the discussion on the changing notion of news among Filipino broadcast audiences and the broadcast media gatekeepers through the use of user-generated content. Several versions of singular events are allowed to be told, thus subverting the news media’s monopoly of the telling of events. This paper looks at some of the web videos that made the jump from sites like YouTube and Facebook, and assesses their newsworthiness according to those set by the mass media. Are audiences and producers influencing a change in the criteria of newsworthiness? Through a rhetorical analysis, this paper proposes a switch to the “little narratives” often regarded as novelty by corporate media, and argues for the quotidian that exist as story fragments; the private lives of individuals contribute to the conceptualization of news from the others’ perspective.