https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695818756738 Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 2019, Vol. 74(1) 92–101 © AEJMC 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1077695818756738 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/jmc Essay Breaking “News”: Majority Can’t Define Mass Communication Kevin Ells 1 Abstract Current communication textbooks proffer conflicting, vague, or incomplete definitions of the core concepts of “mass communication” and “news,” contributing to confusion among students, and subsequently in the public sphere, of what experts in the field mean when discussing news and mass media. The analysis in this article disentangles a clear definition of mass communication from the related concepts of mass media and mediated communication, as well as clearly differentiating the concept of “news” from the adjacent concepts of journalism and entertainment. Discussion concludes with implications for communication education and improved public understanding of the field. Keywords mass communication, mass media, mediated communication, newsworthiness An updated report on Difficult Conversations from the Harvard Negotiation Project suggested that, rather than assigning or accepting blame for the painful status of an ongoing interpersonal conflict, a party to it aim to articulate his or her contribution to the problem or impasse. In short, abandon the idea of blame, and instead map the con- tribution system (Stone, Patton, and Heen, 2010). In this spirit, I suggest here how some of us in the sibling disciplines of mass communication and journalism education might have contributed to current misapprehensions and disagreements among users of mediated content in the early 21st-century mediasphere. Our contribution lies in conceiving, writing, publishing, and teaching imprecise or conflated definitions of core ideas in mass communication and journalism such that 1 Texas A&M University–Texarkana, USA Corresponding Author: Kevin Ells, Texas A&M University–Texarkana, 7101 University Avenue, Texarkana, TX 75503, USA. Email: kells@tamut.edu 756738JMC XX X 10.1177/1077695818756738Journalism & Mass Communication EducatorElls research-article 2018