According to the It's News To Me: Journalism in the Internet Age website, "In the early days of history, when communication was by word-of-mouth, it seemed simple what news was. News was whatever a person's pastor, store keeper or neighbor told them, about things they didn't already know."" .
An article in The Jackson Sun tells about the changing definition of news. Madison County Mayor Alex Leech said that in 1954 "we had news every hour."" He said that it was mainly church news and news of meetings. Leech said, "Times were just different then. We tried to keep trouble down. People simply weren't comfortable with the stories they heard about whites attacking demonstrators and using cattle prods to move people from stores."".
Today, some organizations still believe this is news. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism is determined to see citizens as participants in the democratic process. They believe that news is when you cover citizens as the shareholders of democracy. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism claims, " because a wider lens can capture more territory and more detail, your readers and community have a truer, more accurate reflection of themselves. Which is what news is really all about."".
Other organizations have begun to change steering away from the idea that news is simply what is going on next door. The American Journalism Review suggests, "Many newspapers at some point in the 80s or 90s declared government coverage boring, announced that they would cover the issues readers really care about and, under the guise of redeployment, proceeded to cut beat coverage and overall staffing to the point that nothing gets covered well."" What seemed to interest people decades before was now boring. News has seemingly become entertainment. The American Journalism Review says, "Time and People, once wholly different, even antagonistic cousins, now seemed hard to tell apart.
