News is the information that reports about people, events, places and other things. People gather news through their local newspaper, radio and television. The emergence of social media has changed the way in which we gather and disseminate news, as more people share stories with their friends and family through Facebook and Twitter.
In the United States, national news refers to issues directly involving the country’s government or institutions such as the military or schools, in contrast to world news which includes a wide range of topics affecting multiple nations. National news can also include political coverage such as elections or public policy debates.
The main news sources in the United States are commercial television networks and newspapers. However, there are many other sources of news. Some are non-commercial and purely factual, while others focus on politics or entertainment. The largest private broadcasters are ABC, CBS and NBC, with their regional and national news programs. Public broadcasters such as PBS offer a variety of news programming. Some even have dedicated news channels such as NY1 in New York City and WJLA 24/7 News (formerly NewsChannel 8) in Washington, DC.
The major commercial news organizations have large bureaus in the US and around the world, covering a number of regions. This allows them to produce a wide variety of content on a daily basis and to cover most regions at least occasionally. In addition to their own in-house production, they also rely on news agencies to prepare articles that they can distribute to all their outlets. These articles are normally based on hard news stories and contain the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why.