Common topics for news reports include war, government, politics, education, health, the environment, economy, business, fashion, and entertainment, as well as athletic events, quirky or unusual events. Government proclamations, concerning royal ceremonies, laws, taxes, public health, and criminals, have been dubbed news since ancient times. Technological and social developments, often driven by government communication and espionage networks, have increased the speed with which news can spread, as well as influenced its content. The genre of news as we know it today is closely associated with the newspaper.

As its name implies, “news” typically connotes the presentation of new information.^[5][6] The newness of news gives it an uncertain quality which distinguishes it from the more careful investigations of history or other scholarly disciplines.^[6][7][8] Whereas historians tend to view events as causally related Manifestations of underlying processes, news stories tend to describe events in isolation, and to exclude discussion of the relationships between them.^[9] News conspicuously describes the world in the present or immediate past, even when the most important aspects of a news story have occurred long in the past—or are expected to occur in the future. To make the news, an ongoing process must have some “peg”, an event in time which anchors it to the present moment.^[9][10] Relatedly, news often addresses aspects of reality which seem unusual, deviant, or out of the ordinary.^[11] Hence the famous dictum that “Dog Bites Man” is not news, but “Man Bites Dog” is.^[12]

Another corollary of the newness of news is that, as new technology enables new media to disseminate news more quickly, ‘slower’ forms of communication may move away from ‘news’ towards ‘analysis’.