JOUR1111 - Lecture 9

News Values

26.9.12

Well, what exactly is the definition of this? 

'The degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience'

That is where this weeks lecture began which I thought was great because I found the title 'News Values' to be quite an expansive concept that needed some boundaries set to it. Little did I know that Dr. Redman would shortly go on to set all boundaries aside with his quote from Stuart Hall which stated ''...News Values are one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern society...'' Yep, so much for my boundaries of concept confinement...

He went on to remind me of the billions of events and stories that occur on a day to day basis, a sand grain of which actually become 'news'. It is this selection that is what concerns us as 'wannabe' journalists and it is News Values which determine it. 

The 'Values' include:

1. IMPACT...grabbing the readers attention, the 'WOW' factor

2. AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION...topics/stories of interest that engage audiences and don't bore them to tears

3. PRAGMATICS...includes what is ethically sound and practical to publish, day to day current affairs and information people will find useful

4. SOURCE INFLUENCE'...the relationship between journalism and public relations, the constraint PR places on that which i able to be published and that which must be withheld

What is plain to see however is that what constitutes News Values for one person, culture, country and so on, can vary considerably in comparison to the next. This in turn means that it is impossible to set forth exact individual values - there is just too much diversity!! The most commonly used image to illustrate News Values across such diversity however is the inverted pyramid. Professor John Galtung's research also demonstrates that which is deemed as 'newsworthiness' across different cultures and countries with his '12+ Factors'. Such things as negativity, uniqueness, recency, currency and so on all have different effects on what is determined as the most important news and what should be published and in what order or left out altogether and so on. Complementing this is his and Ruge's 'newsworthiness Hypotheses' which follows:

>The additivity hypothesis = the more of the 12+factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability is becomes news

>The complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other

>The exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will usually not become news

Murray Masterson had another version of this idea, suggesting that in fact it was 'the big 6 values' that determined the news, those being significance, proximity, conflict, human interest, novelty and prominence. 

News Values, it appears however, are not set in stone and therefore not one criteria for what constitutes newsworthiness is right or wrong. What the audience wants and indeed the audience itself is changing all the time and as a result so are News Values.