News Values

So what are news values? According to this week's lecture they are "the degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience". The quote by Stuart Hall that Bruce brings to mind gets me thinking. We don't often think carefully about who picks the stories because we assume that the most important stories will "select themselves" - they are the ones that will make headlines. But only a fraction of stories are seen as potential news stories and of this fraction, only a tiny portion are produced as daily news. And we choose these stories by the amount of news value they have.

What are the news values, I hear you say? Well my pretties, here they are:
Impact: news that contains the x-factor babeh.
Audience Identification: news that interests and connects with the audience.
Pragmatics: ethics, practicality and facticity.
Source Influence: public relations ;) Let's face it. We need them and they do a good job.

As one would suspect, news values differ across different countries, cultures, news services and the list goes on. Everyone will always have different news values. It may be subjective, depending on the topic, but essentially we all have our own values. And this is where the inverted pyramid comes into play again. The most important and sought after details go at the beginning of the story, then come the more important details and then background and general information finish the story off. The information at the top is considered the most newsworthy and the information at the end is the least newsworthy so if we're over our word count we can just chop that end bit off! We can see this coming into social media as well. As Bruce so rightly mentioned, with Twitter, you are only allowed 140 characters so you've got to make sure that what you tweet counts!

"If it bleeds, it leads". Crude, but true. This is the way many television news programs value stories. No wonder we see so many stories about murder, violence and war.
"If it's local, it leads". This statement is also true. There is something about the proximity of a story happening that draws an audience in. Obviously if something is happening locally people want to be aware of it. Perhaps this is why the Allison Baden-Clay case has gotten so much publicity - because it combines both of these values.

And what of newsworthiness? Certain factors define how newsworthy something is:
Negativity: I think you can figure this one out for yourself - bad news.
Proximity: this is going back to the whole "if it's local it leads" notion. People relate to things that are physically close to them.
Recency: The whole concept of breaking news! Media outlets are very competitive with being able to produce stories as they happen but sometimes stories take a while to gather all the facts so be aware because the first story hot off the press may not be the most accurate.
Currency: Sort of the opposite to recency. These stories are more about ongoing cases. People love follow up stories and want to be kept up to date with what is happening with the story and want to know the eventual outcome.
Continuity: These are the stories that have a continuing impact on society
Uniqueness: Who hasn't seen the video of the bear falling out of the tree?

And if you hadn't seen it before, well now you have and now you can see that it is, indeed, unique.
Simplicity: I, for one, am so in with this factor. There is no way in hell that I would read something about some complicated conflict that requires me to put to use more than ten brain cells over a nice, simple story. And apparently, the majority of society agrees with me. And if you don't? Haters gon' hate.
Personality: People also love stories about... well, people. Particularly if that person is well-known.Celebrity gossip anyone?
Predictability: Will what we think will happen, happen? DUN DUN DUNNNNN. Pretty straightforward.
Elite nations/people: We also like stories about powerful people and powerful nations. All hail Obama! And all definitely do not hail Julia Gillard... the wench.
Exclusivity: We always see or hear the phrase "a ___ news exclusive!" And why? Because if that media outlet has an exclusive then it means higher ratings and more moneyyyyy! Plus, as a viewer or reader, we feel exclusive after reading something exclusive. Am I right or am I right?
Size: And lastly size. Apparently it does matter ;) hehehe. But seriously, the bigger impact a story has, the bigger an audience it generates, the more money it involves and the higher value it then has. AKA, threshold.


There are also three hypotheses on newsworthiness:
The additivity hypothesis: the more factors an event includes, the higher chance it has of becoming news.
The complementarity hypothesis: factors tend to exclude each other.
The exclusion hypothesis: events that satisfy none or few factors will most likely not become news.


Now these factors and hypotheses were created in 1965 by Galtung and Ruge, but in 1979 Golding and Elliott came along and created another set of factors that depicted newsworthiness. And as the times changed, so did the factors of what was newsworthy: drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment, importance, size, proximity, negativity, brevity, recency, elites, personalities.

I'm sure another set of factors that define newsworthiness will crop up sooner or later. And I'm pretty sure social media will be in there somewhere. Perhaps. I mean, it is everywhere now so I wouldn't be surprised.

But anyway, it's bedtime for me now.
Ciao ciao.