hard news, journalistic style and genre that focuses on events or incidents that are considered to be timely and consequential to people locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally. Traditionally, hard news covers topics such as politics, international affairs, economics, and science.
Hard news stands in contrast with “soft news,” which tends to blur the line between information and entertainment. The term soft news originally referred to feature articles, but it has since been applied to a wider range of news, usually including human-interest stories. General topic areas that are typically considered soft news include entertainment, arts, celebrities, and other culture-related subjects.
Although the terms hard news and soft news have been used for decades in communication studies, they lack clear-cut definitions and thus are understood in different ways by different researchers. While some topics, such as politics and economics, are generally regarded as hard news, others, such as natural disasters, have been labeled hard by some researchers and soft by others.
Other aspects of hard news are its timeliness and its reporting style. Hard news tends to be time-sensitive and urgent, with coverage of reported events or specific topics quickly becoming outdated. Additionally, hard news is associated with objective reporting, standing in contrast to soft news, which is considered to be more individualized and subjective.
From 1995, studies by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), an undertaking of the World Association of Christian Communication, have demonstrated that female journalists are more likely than male journalists to be assigned stories with soft news topics. Although GMMP’s 2020 report shows that female journalists are assigned a more diverse range of topics than they have been in the past, some hard news topics are still characterized by a sizable gender disparity. For example, as of 2020, only 33 percent of news stories concerning crime and violence published in traditional media—i.e., print and digital newspapers—were written by female reporters. Similarly, female reporters in traditional media were responsible for only 35 percent of stories concerning politics and government. Such disparities presumably reflect a continuing gender bias within news organizations according to which female journalists are more interested in and capable of reporting on soft news rather than hard news topics.
In a 2011 study, “Hard and Soft News: A Review of Concepts, Operationalizations and Key Findings,” Carsten Reinemann and others proposed a set of three dimensions in terms of which degree of hardness or softness of news stories could be measured: a topic dimension, a focus dimension, and a style dimension. According to this model, the more that news is politically relevant, focuses on societal consequences, and is stylistically impersonal and unemotional, the “harder” it is, or the more closely it approximates hard news. The more that news is the inverse—less politically relevant, more focused on individuals and framed episodically, and more personal and emotional—the “softer” it is, or the more closely it approximates soft news.
Soft news has historically been considered less important than hard news; the term soft news has even been used derogatorily, owing to its association with lighter topics. The 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, shows that, on average, public interest tends to be greater for hard news topics than for soft news topics—although the study also notes that this result is likely influenced by survey respondents’ “social desirability bias,” or “the idea that it is more acceptable” to be interested in hard news than in soft news.
In their 2014 study, “Soft News with Hard Consequences? Introducing a Nuanced Measure of Soft Versus Hard News Exposure and Its Relationship with Political Cynicism,” Mark Boukes and Hajo G. Boomgaarden suggested that soft news is correlated with increased political cynicism and that it has a negative impact on democracy, owing to its episodic framing of sensational topics, such as crime, disasters, crises, or scandals. Hard news, in contrast, involves fewer of these topics, instead focusing on general political issues from a policy perspective.
In a later article, “News Consumption and Its Unpleasant Side Effect: Studying the Effect of Hard and Soft News Exposure on Mental Well-Being over Time” (2017), Boukes and Rens Vliegenthart argued that, because hard news topics are generally more negative than soft news topics, hard news tends to adversely affect consumers’ mental well-being. And although people who consume more soft news have a lower level of mental well-being than hard-news consumers, Boukes and Vliegenthart suggest that this fact could be the result of “selection effects”: it is possible that “citizens with a lower mental well-being…select this kind of news, rather than that soft news…negatively influence[s] their mental well-being.”
Regardless of the effects of hard and soft news, researchers generally agree that hard news and soft news are not wholly distinct categories but rather exist on a continuum. In the current media landscape, hard and soft news techniques are often blended. Topics that are traditionally considered hard news can be softened by using a different style of reporting, and soft news frequently incorporates information that is of political and societal importance. A story about an election, for example, may have a hard news topic, but a journalist may choose to approach it softly by focusing on the personal experiences of individuals who participate in the election or are affected by its outcome.