Lecture on News Values

News values within journalism operate within a similar sphere to the principles of agenda setting. They refer to the degree of prominence that media outlets give to certain stories and the attention that is paid to them by audiences. It is hard to establish the cause and effect - whether it is the audience's interests that drive the type of stories covered by the media or whether it is the media that dictates which stories that viewers should be interested in.  News values depend on:

1. Impact - News that is interesting and that has the ability to grab attention.
2. Audience Identification - News that is interesting and relevant to the world. Audiences should be able to relate to what is happening and desire to know more about what is being shown.
3. Pragmatics - Principles such as ethics, facticity, practical current affairs and everyday concerns are an important component of news values.
4. Influence of the Source - The credibility of the source is important and journalism's relationship with public relations is also a relevant factor. PR can spin stories, control access to information and protect and shield clients. Sometimes this can happen at the expense of the truth and it is important not to be blind to this.  

Values are concerned with NEWSWORTHINESS and they differ from region to region and country to country. There are common threads of interest though, common tag lines that have become synonymous with news values include:

• If it Bleeds it Leads! - murder, shootings, accidents, trauma...the world is obsessed with the dark and twisted.
• If it's Local it Leads - people care about what is near and relevant to them. They care about what affects them.

A sense of news values should be intrinsic to journalists, as having the ability to identify what is newsworthy and what is interesting to the public is an incredibly useful quality. Good instincts can go a long way. 

Howard Evans (Editor of the Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981) believed that "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 the ability to write or a command of language."

Many news corporations and journalists have attempted to establish common factors and news agendas within the media. The aim is to discover what news is worthy of a headline and what will garner the most attention. 

There are an infinite number of possible news values and these values are not universal. They differ within certain localities and countries and each they are subjective - different people will have different opinions over what is are the most prominent values.  

News values can include negativity, proximity, recency, currency, continuity, personality, predictability, elite nations or people, celebrity, exclusivity, magnitude, drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment, importance, controversy, unusualness and the emotional. 

Galtung and Ruge developed the following 3 Hypotheses that establish what is newsworthy and what is not (the hypotheses are essentially common sense):

1. The ADDITIVITY hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news.
2. The COMPLEMENTARITY hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other.
3. The EXCLUSION hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news. 

Some of the threats that complicate the perception of newsworthiness include the commercialisation of media and social life (too many platforms to keep track of and too much useless information), public relations (obscuring and subverting the truth) and how ideals of journalism that aim to address hard-hitting and serious issues are sacrificed for tabloidy trash.