Lecture #10- News Values

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What is meant by the term news values?

News values relate to the degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story and the attention that is paid by an audience.

From this definition, we can see how intricately linked news values are with agenda setting in the media.

"News journalism has a broadly agreed set of values often referred to as newsworthiness". -A. Boyd 1994

News values are comprised of the following elements:

• impact
• audience identification
• pragmatics
• source influence

Although the titles themselves are self-evident, I will elaborate: briefly. Impact refers to the impact the news item has on the audience. Audience Identification is anything that's interesting to the audience. Pragmatics are the more technical elements such as ethics, facts, current affairs, practice and everyday items. Source influence refers to any bias from the provider of the news, where the news comes from and PR.

An interesting research analysis was conducted by Galtung and Ruge in 1965 concerning what common factors are present in newspapers or bulletins to discover trends in newsworthiness and agenda.  
Studies since 1965 have been conducted with the same intention and have returned strikingly similar results. Galtung and Ruge suggested that the main elements which are present in the news to appeal to audiences are:

• negativity- sad news makes for good news
• closeness to home- local news
• recency- breaking news
• currency- ongoing stories or current events
• continuity- events with a continuing impact e.g. war
• uniqueness- strange, bizarre or attention grabbing stories
• simplicity- easy to explain stories
• personality- human interest pieces
• expectancy- predictability
• elite nations or people- news stories that cover important, powerful nations or organisations and key individuals e.g. famous politicians, celebrities
• exclusivity- having what no other news company has
• size- threshold

Journalism and commercialisation of media and social life, journalism and PR and journalism's ideals and journalism's reality are all perceived threats to newsworthiness.

Contemporary news is somewhat concerning to me in the same manner in which contemporary politics is somewhat concerning to me. The two fields in my opinion have a strong focus on pleasing a mass audience and consequently are lacking in independent and revolutionary thought. For journalism, this is achieved through agenda setting and what is deemed newsworthy and in my opinion what the mass audience wants to hear about is not what I want to hear about. For example, I couldn't care less about which football star has recently had a bender, I care about who's dying in Libya, but; each to their own I suppose.