what is news?

Whilst meeting my personal tutor today, he brought up a very interesting question - what is news? Is there a clear definition? Of course, as new Journalism students, we gave the general answers one would expect; news was communication of information to feed curiosity. My tutor agreed that that was a very good answer. However, he said, there was a very good definition by British Journalist Harold Evans (editor to the Sunday Times who uncovered the Thalidomide scandal) who simply said that news could be defined in three words:

News is people.

I found this quite powerful. The reason we read news is because everything in the news affects us as people, whether directly or not. For example, we are interested in the events of Hurricane Harvey and Irma because it is affecting a group of people extremely badly, even though it has no direct affect on us. In the same way, someone would be interested in a news story about developments in cancer research because the illness has affected someone in their family, therefore having a direct impact on them. We consume all this media because it is about us. 

In this modern social age of over-sharing, we all want to know what everyone is doing all the time. The fact that the media will always target people by being about people only feeds all this curiosity that we all have - this keeps the media thriving, feeding curious appetites for information all over the world. News is suddenly running our lives - our thoughts, our opinions, our actions - and we can't get enough. News is us as a world population, and our consumption of it gives it the power to become us. News is people.