Journalism-Lecture 9-News Values

Today's lecture was based around news values in the journalism industry. 


News Values can be defined as, "the degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story and the attention that is paid by an audience". So it is essentially how stories are written and how they are marketed to the audience and then how the readers respond to that piece.


An interesting question involving this topic is how do you choose which will be the lead story on the news or in the newspapers or on television?


One quote which was really cool was" News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And its only news until he’s read it. After that its dead". Bruce said that this quote was really old but when you think about it, it is still really relevant to modern times. 


We were told that there are four factors which govern news values and they are  Impact, audience identification, pragmatics and source influence. Impact refers to anything that makes reader surprised or excited or impressed. Audience identification refers to the readers wanting to know what is going on and feeling a sense of ownership and pragmatics refers to ethics and current affairs. Finally, source influence basically means PR and how it is becoming more prominent with journalism.  


We were then posed a question; · are news values the same across different news services? Are news values the same across different countries/cultures? And the answer was no!! News values are very different across cultures and countries. It is very much subjective, however there are some exceptions.


The two slogans "If it bleeds, it leads" or "If its local, it leads are common predictors of what will govern the front page of the news. If it bleeds refers to anything relating to deaths of superstars, murders, car accidents or tragedies and if its local refers to floods, droughts, elections, sport or charity things. 

We were then introduced to the initial 12 factors of newsworthiness. They were  Negativity, closeness to home(proximity), recency, currency, continuity, uniqueness, simplicity, personality, expectedness, elite nations of people, exclusivity, and size.

However, from that point on there have been people who have reduced the factors to less and added in some new ones. For example, some are   drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment, importance, size, proximity, negativity, brevity, recency, elites and personalities. O'Neil and Harcup said that the most important factors were the power elite, celebrity, entertainment, surprise, bad news, good news, magnitude, relevance, follow-up and newspaper agenda

Murray Masterson narrowed it down to 6 news values which were significance, proximity, conflict, human interest, novelty and prominence. 

One of the main things I learnt from this lecture is how the factors of newsworthiness are constantly changing as time goes on and people can dictate what they think will make news to their own personal opinion.

I thought this lecture was interesting because of these factors and the different headlines for what makes a lead story. 


Below is a link to a website which states almost the exact same news values as was stated in the lecture but slightly less. Take a look. 


http://www.uncp.edu/home/acurtis/Courses/ResourcesForCourses/NewsValues.html