News Values
News Values: The degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience.
News Values
1. IMPACT
2. AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION
3. PRAGMATICS
4. SOURCE INFLUENCE
"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."
"The College of Osmosis"
Evans (2000)
News Values
Impact- The facts and events that have the greatest effect on the audience are the most newsworthy
Weight- The significance of a particular fact or event lies in its value with respect to other facts or events
Controversy- Arguments, debates, charges, countercharges, and fights increase the value of news
Emotion- Take into account human interests that touch our emotions
The Unusual- When a dog bites a man it's not news. But when a man bites a dog, it is news.
Prominence- More prominent individuals are given more attention
Proximity- Concentrate on news that is of local interest; the closer to home the better
Timeliness- Emphasize what is new
Currency- Take into account what is on people's minds
Usefulness- Help the audience answer questions and solve problems in their daily lives
Educational Value- Make readers more knowledgeable rather than merely informed
Tensions of newsworthiness
- Journalism / Commercialization of media and social life
- Journalism / Public Relations
- Journalism‘s ideals / Journalism‘s reality
Golding and Elliots News Values
- Drama
- Visual attractiveness
- Entertainment
- Importance
- Size
- Proximity
- Negativity
- Brevity
- Recency (exclusives, scoops)
- Elites
- Personalities
Galtung and Ruge News Values
Value | Description |
| Negativity | Bad news - involving death, tragedy, bankruptcy, violence, damage, natural disasters, political upheaval or simply extreme weather conditions - is always rated above 'positive' stories (royal weddings, celebrations etc) |
| Closeness to home (Proximity) | Audiences supposedly relate more to stories that are close to them geographically, or involve people from their country, or those that are reported that way(eg '12 Hong Kongers aboard Australia Crash Plane'). News gatekeepers must consider carefully how meaningful a story will be to their particular audience |
| Recency | Newspapers are very competitive about breaking news - about revealing stories as they happen. 24 hour news channels such as CNN and BBC World also rate this value very highly. However, as we have seen with the events of September 11, stories may take a while to develop, and become coherent, so recency is not always the best value to rate. |
| Currency | This is almost opposite to recency, in that stories that have been in the public eye for some time already are deemed valuable. Therefore a story - for instance about the abduction and murder of a child - may run for weeks and weeks, even if nothing new really happens. |
| Continuity | Events that are likely to have a continuing impact (a war, a two week sports tournament) have a high value when the story breaks, as they will develop into an ongoing narrative which will get audiences to 'tune in tomorrow'. |
Uniqueness | 'Dog Bites Man' is not a story. 'Man Bites Dog' is. Any story which covers a unique or unusual event (two-headed elephant born to Birmingham woman) has news values |
| Simplicity | Obvious, but true. Stories which are easy to explain ('Cat stuck up tree') are preferred over stories which are not (anything to do with the Balkan or Palestinian conflicts) |
Personality | Stories that centre around a particular person, because they can be presented from a 'human interest' angle, are beloved of newspapers, particularly if they involve a well-known person. Some say this news value has become distorted, and that news organisations over-rate personality stories, particularly those involving celebrities ('Posh Goes Shopping'). What do you think? |
Expectedness (Predictability) | Does the event match the expectations of a news organisation and its audience? Or, has what was expected to happen (violence at a demonstration, horrific civilian casualties in a terrorist attack) actually happened? If a news story conforms to the preconceived ideas of those covering it, then it has expectedness as an important news value |
| Elite Nations Or People | Any story which covers an important, powerful nation (or organisation) has greater news values than a story which covers a less important nation. The same goes for people. George Bush is newsworthy whatever he does. |
Exclusivity | Also a major factor when setting the news agenda. If a newspaper or news programme is the first and only news organisation breaking a story, then they will rate that very highly. The UK Sunday papers are very fond of exclusives, and will often break a story of national or international importance that no one else has. |
| Size | does matter when it comes to news stories. The bigger impact a story has, the more people it affects, the more money/resources it involves, the higher its value. This is also known as threshold |
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