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An example of a breaking news intro graphic

Breaking news is a current event that broadcasters feel warrants the interruption of scheduled programming in order to report its details. Its use is often loosely assigned to the most significant story of the moment or a story that is being covered live. It could be a story that is simply of wide interest to viewers and has little impact otherwise.

The format of a special report or breaking news event on television commonly consists of an opening graphic, featuring music which adds an emphasis on the importance of the event. This is usually followed with the introduction of a news anchor, who welcomes the viewer to the broadcast and introduces the story at hand.

Once the story is introduced, the network may choose to continue to show a live shot of the anchor or may cut away to video or images of the story that is being followed during the broadcast. Additionally, the coverage may be passed to a reporter at the location of the breaking event, possibly sharing more information about the story as it breaks.

Depending upon the story being followed, the report may last only a few minutes, or continue for multiple hours at a time. If coverage continues for an extended amount of time, the network may integrate analysis about the story through analysts in-studio, via. phone, satellite, or through other means of communication.

When the coverage comes to a close, the network may either resume programming that was occurring prior to the event or begin new programming, depending upon the amount of time spent on the coverage.

While in the past programming interruptions were restricted to extremely urgent news, such breaks are now common at 24-hour news channels which may have an anchor available for live interruption at any time. Some networks, such as Sky News, largely emphasize this, even advertising the station as being "first for breaking news".

The term breaking news has come to replace the older use of news bulletin. There has been widespread use of breaking news at the local level, particularly when one station in a market wants to emphasize the exclusivity of coverage. Not all viewers agree that stories assigned breaking news rise to the significance or level of interest that warrant such a designation.

When a network begins coverage of a breaking story, the early details about the stories are commonly sketchy, usually due to the limited amount of resources available to the reporters for information during the time the story initially breaks. An example of this was during the Sago Mine disaster, in which the initial reports were that the 12 miners were found alive, but the network later found only one actually survived.

Another criticism has been the diluting of the importance of breaking news by the need of 24-hour news channels to fill time, using the title when covering any number of soft news stories, one example being car chases.

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