Is Framing a Key Element for a News Item To Fall into the Soft or Hard Category?
Is Framing a Key Element for a News Item To Fall into the Soft or Hard Category?

Summary/Abstract: Today, mass media’s need to attract and maintain their audiences shows a pronounced tendency of the news outlets to a ”news softening”, to the disadvantage of what is traditionally defined as ”hard news”. Despite this trend identified over the past decades, there is actually no consensus among communication scholars on the definition of ”hard” and ”soft” news. Moreover, some authors suggest the necessity to introduce a third news category – ”general news”, arguing that the hard/soft dichotomy is not sufficient to cover news diversity. In order to include a news item in the hard or soft category, other scholars consider not only the topic of a news item, but also the way that topic is framed. In this article, we review a series of theoretical considerations and empirical findings on hard news, soft news, and their relation with framing. We also discuss, in this respect, two directions identified in the scholarly literature: one that goes from hard and soft news to framing, and another that goes from framing to hard and soft news. This article aims to give some arguments in favor of the latter direction, which relies on the idea that a framing-based approach on this dichotomic news classification could be more relevant to the current media landscape.

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