Have you heard the tale of the Dog That Speaks Polish?

Raymond Snoddy, questions the definition of news – from a shaggy dog story that is more newsy than a Royal engagement, to the extent to which TV news is “led by the nose” by everything from dramatic pictures to stunts manufactured by interest groups to get attention…

After all these years of intellectual inquiry, the problem of what is news and what makes a good news story has finally been cracked. It is time to pension off that old chestnut – Man Bites Dog.

Curiously though, a dog is still involved in the new formulation. We can now unveil the tale of the Dog That Speaks Polish. There is understandably the usual slice of journalistic licence involved here. The dog doesn’t actually speak Polish. But Maria McGeoghan, editor of the Manchester Evening News told the Society of Editors conference in Glasgow yesterday that the yarn, which first appeared in the Oldham Advertiser, was her favourite story of the year.

The paper found out that the local RSPCA had a very unhappy dog on its hands that wouldn’t respond to normal commands. Detailed research revealed that the dog had previously lived with a Polish family. New Polish owners were found who spoke Polish to the beast, whose tail hasn’t stopped wagging since.

A bit thin on the gravitas you might think and ultimately a bit of a shaggy dog story but it went round the world and is certainly more newsy than a Royal engagement, which has been on the cards for more than nine years.

Ms McGeoghan is a bit of a journalistic pioneer. Instead of sending news photographers to school Proms she sent pdf files and asked the schools to provide the pictures. She got more than 800 to choose from.

While using new technology there is a clear whiff of back to the future in her definition of news. Readers in Salford still want to know who has been up in court and for what. So the ‘Before The Bench’ column has been created.

Then that ancient staple of local journalism – divorces – has also been resurrected. Readers, the MEN editor revealed, would particularly like the cause of the divorce highlighted in bold type.

Ms McGeoghan was on a panel with a very different and rather cerebral lady, Jodie Ginsberg, Reuters bureau chief for the UK and Ireland.

Pure facts are no longer enough. There are simply too many of them – everywhere. It was the three “C”s that matter nowadays – context, connectivity and community: “We are already drowning in facts.”

She went even further in a move that will warm the heart of Twitterers everywhere: the conversation about the story is more important than the story itself.

In fact the Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger is often more happy about a story that takes in different views from specialist Twitterers round the world than a simple, straight-forward Reuters-generated piece.

Just as remarkable in its own way as the dog which speaks Polish was an apology, well almost, from consultants that they might just have got something a little bit wrong.

Claire Enders, founder of Enders Analysis, shocked the regional newspaper industry two years ago by predicting that half the UK’s local and regional newspapers would close by 2013. That’s 650 papers out of a total of 1,300.

While the observant will note that there is still some way to go to 2013 it now looks very unlikely that 650 newspapers will close in the next two and a half years.

The reality is that so far there have been around 60 closures, mostly free newspapers in towns which have at least one other weekly paper. No dailies have closed and overall there have been more launches than closures so far this year.

Douglas McCabe, the newspaper specialist at Enders admitted yesterday that the prediction had been “unnecessarily pessimistic”.

The television news industry was equally interested in the search for definitions of news at the News XChange conference in Athens last week. More particularly they were beating up on themselves on the extent to which they are “led by the nose” by everything from dramatic pictures to stunts manufactured by interest groups to get attention.

There was a modest bit of hand-wringing about the Greenpeace stunt at the Climate Change summit in Copenhagen that saw protesters dressed as Government leaders gate-crashing the Presidential dinner. Naturally the pictures went round the world as did pictures of the protesters outside the summit. The newsmen and women insisted they had also covered the summit itself comprehensively.

There was criticism too of the coverage of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf. Pictures of the flames on the oil rig and pelicans covered in crude were all too real. But the allegation went that the dramatic pictures tended to obscure perhaps more important though abstract issues involved – such as the failure of regulation that might have allowed the disaster to happen.

CNN admitted that an interview with a local hotelier who argued that only 1% of the region’s beaches were hit by the oil spill had not been transmitted because it might “confuse” viewers.

On the more cerebral side Mike Read of Comscore gave the latest results from his two million strong panel on the growth of consumption of television news worldwide.

There are now no less than 940 million monthly users of news content worldwide and the UK has the highest number of unique viewers within the news and information category in Europe – 35.2 million or 91.6% compared with in second place Germany’s 34 million or a mere 69%.  With video the BBC is totally dominant in the news category.

But Read had a stern warning on internet advertising. Average click through rates had declined by 28% in a single year. “Judging the performance of your advertising on the ‘click’ alone is undervaluing the medium” he said.

Important advice but it’s still difficult to get the Dog Who Speaks Polish out of your head.