The Media Event as Enhanced News Story: How User-Generated Content Determines the News Agenda

Introduction

If we take Dayan and Katz’s (1992) work on media events as a starting point, insofar that a media event is a major happening that is broadcast live, we can see much correlation with news outputs. Indeed all the examples used by Dayan and Katz (1992) would have qualified as being worthy of being high up in the news agendas. However, Dayan and Katz’s (1992) work was published before broadcasting underwent the transition towards digitalisation and the world wide web allowed greater interactivity and connectivity between the audience and producers of content. The eventisation of news has moved on since the days of the, now iconic, Zapruder home movie footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Social media sites and the development of smart phone technology has enabled the average citizen to have more means at their disposal to capture and disseminate still and moving images of news stories before the broadcasters can mobilise.

This chapter is framed within the context that the idea of the audience being passive observers merely absorbing what the media provides is long gone. Citizens are now active participants to the point of taking on the role of the journalist when necessary. What this chapter will explore is how that active participation has enabled broadcasters to work with their audience and vice versa in the creation of media events. While the chapter will take a discursive approach methodologically the discussion will be rooted in three news stories which became media events in the first half of 2015, namely the terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and the beaches of Tunisia in January and June respectively as well as the live on air murder of Alison Parker and Adam Ward in August 2015.