Lecture 9: News Values
“News values are one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern society … Journalists speak of ‘the news’ as if events select themselves … Yet of the millions of events which occur daily in the world, only a tiny proportion ever become visible as ‘potential news stories’; and of this proportion, only a small fraction are actually produced as the day’s news …”
Stuart Hall 1973
So who and what decides which events become the news?
Are there defining news values that are universal, or are they specific to culture, audience and outlet?
The concept of news values is dynamic, the values
change according to the importance or insignificance of factors that relate to
society and the world today. However there are some universal traits within
journalism and communication that determine the degree of prominence a story is
give in the daily news. Dr Redman asked us to step back for a minute and
consider what a day’s news report or front page of a newspaper might look like
if the popular news values (that measure an events newsworthiness) were not
fulfilled. The news pyramid that directs the reader’s attention would cave in
on itself as the most news worthy story would flop dismally. Following Galtung
and Ruge’s three hypothesis theory and the exclusion hypothesis, “events that satisfy none of
very few of the (news worthiness) factors will not usually become news.”
News Values Defined: Guidelines that decide news
worthiness and prominence.
Impact: A news
story that is going to have a high impact on a large amount of people. “News is
anything that makes the reader say ‘Gee Whiz!’.”
Audience Identification:
A news story that relates to your audience, therefore appropriate to their
culture, interests, location, or world news of high interest.
Pragmatics: A
news story that is practical in a reporting sense and often relates to current
affairs; a story that doesn’t compromise any news ethics.
Source Influence: the
degree of influence other sources have had on the facticity of the story, the truth,
how accessible a story is or how much spin is put into a story. An example of
this struggle between reporting truth and source influence is the relationship
between journalism and public relations.
Other general rules within the industry, that are not necessary
learned but become instinctive, are “if
it bleed it leads” or “if its local
it leads”. Stories that feature accidents, death, disasters and danger will
lead the headlines; events such as this satisfy news factors such as negativity
(bad news) and drama. These are the events that relate well to audience
interest but are also stories that conflict with news ethics. This would call
for consideration of how a journalist presents a story so as to fulfill these
news values but also conform to ethical news reporting.
Promotions within commercial media focus
heavily on local stories and use this news value to draw in their audience by
making their local community “the news, seen first on channel nine” for
example. This spin on a story satisfies factors like proximity and relevance.
When looking at how news worthiness is determined in a
journalism environment, key qualities that direct this decision making are not
always solely the qualities of a journalist.
“A sense of news values” is
the first quality of editors –
they are the “human sieves
of the torrent of
news”, even more
important even than an
ability to write or a command of
language.”
Harold Evans -Editor of The Sunday Times 1967 to 1981
As evens says ‘a sense of news values’ is essential to
deciding what runs as the news on any given day, he also speaks of the
importance of the ‘College of Osmosis’, a concept that works around the practical
learning in an industry environment to nurture the instinctive skills or ‘sense’
that direct a journalist’s decision of how to present a story.
The news values acknowledged by editors, journalists and PR personnel
alike, can be conformed to a list of a dozen common factors. However, with our
ever changing world and the changing of culture, what is current and
interesting is not always what has traditionally been important or newsworthy.
This is the reason so many professionals and academics have theorised these
news values with their own interpretation of important news added to this ever
expanding list. Just a few of the
foundation values and some of the newly added, and newly appropriate, values
can be seen below.
Some Newsworthiness Factors:
Some classics!
Negativity (bad news)
Proximity (Local News or geographically relevant)
Uniqueness (New news or an unusual event)
Elitism (stories that follow people, nations or organisations
that are of public importance or have a great deal of power/influence)
Continuity (a story that has been or has the potential to be
of public interest for a prolonged period of time, for example the Olympics)
And some newly relevant factors!
Visual attractiveness (stories that can be presented in a
visually attractive way, appropriate for TV reporting or online news where use
of info graphics etc. can be applied)
Celebrification of the journalist (how much involvement a
journalist has in a story, programs such as ‘A Current Affair’ and ’60 Minutes’
use their journalists as a hook for a story)
Terrorism (the us and them concept slighting altered to
feature the underlying fear or scare factor of terrorism following events such
as the September 11th Attack and the 2005 London Bombings)
The Global Financial Crisis (reports of the stock market are
now rarely not reinforced by results of the GFC)
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