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News values
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News values are "criteria that influence the selection and presentation of events as published news." These values help explain what makes something "newsworthy."[1]
News values are not universal and can vary between different cultures.[2] Among the many lists of news values that have been drawn up by scholars and journalists, some attempt to describe news practices across cultures, while others have become remarkably specific to the press of particular (often Western) nations. In the Western tradition, decisions on the selection and prioritization of news are made by editors on the basis of their experience and intuition, although analysis by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge showed that several factors are consistently applied across a range of news organizations. Their theory was tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuban crisis of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March–April 1964. Results were mainly consistent with their theory and hypotheses.[3] Galtung later said that the media have misconstrued his work and become far too negative, sensational, and adversarial.[4]
Methodologically and conceptually, news values can be approached from four different perspectives: material (focusing on the material reality of events), cognitive (focusing on people's beliefs and value systems), social (focusing on journalistic practice), and discursive (focusing on the discourse).[5] A discursive perspective tries to systematically examine how news values such as negativity, proximity, eliteness, and others, are constructed through words and images in published news stories. This approach is influenced by linguistics and social semiotics, and is called "discursive news values analysis" (DNVA).[6][better source needed] It focuses on the "distortion" step in Galtung and Ruge's chain of news communication, by analysing how events are discursively constructed as newsworthy.
History
[edit]Initially labelled "news factors," news values are widely credited to Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge.[3] In their seminal 1965 study,[3] Galtung and Ruge put forward a system of twelve factors describing events that together are used as defining "newsworthiness." Focusing on newspapers and broadcast news, Galtung and Ruge devised a list describing what they believed were significant contributing factors as to how the news is constructed. They proposed a "chain of news communication,"[3]: 65 which involves processes of selection (the more an event satisfies the "news factors," the more likely it is selected as news), distortion (accentuating the newsworthy factors of the event, once it has been selected), and replication (selection and distortion are repeated at all steps in the chain from event to reader). Furthermore, three basic hypotheses are presented by Galtung and Ruge: the additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news; the complementary hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other; and the exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will not become news.
In 2001, the influential 1965 study was updated by Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill, in a study of the British press. The findings of a content analysis of three major national newspapers in the UK were used to critically evaluate Galtung and Ruge's original criteria and to propose a contemporary set of news values. Forty years on, they found some notable differences, including the rise of celebrity news and that good news (as well as bad news) was a significant news value, as well as the newspaper's own agenda. They examined three tabloid newspapers.[7]
Contemporary news values
[edit]In a rapidly evolving market, achieving relevance, giving audiences the news they want and find interesting, is an increasingly important goal for media outlets seeking to maintain market share. This has made news organizations more open to audience input and feedback, and forced them to adopt and apply news values that attract and keep audiences. Given these changes and the rapid rise of digital technology in recent years, Harcup and O'Neill updated their 2001 study in 2016,[8] while other scholars have analysed news values in viral news shared via social media.[9] The growth of interactive media and citizen journalism is fast altering the traditional distinction between news producer and passive audience and may in future lead to a redefinition of what "news" means and the role of the news industry.
List of news values
[edit]A variety of external and internal pressures influence journalistic decisions during the news-making process, which can sometimes lead to bias or unethical reporting. Many different factors have the potential to influence whether an event is first noticed by a news organisation, second whether a story will be written about that event, third, how that story is written, and fourth whether this story will end up being published as news and if so, where it is placed. Therefore, "there is no end to lists of news criteria."[10] There are multiple competing lists of news values (including Galtung & Ruge's news factors, and others put forward by Schlesinger,[11] Bell,[12] Bednarek & Caple[5]), with considerable overlap but also disagreement as to what should be included.[13]
News values can relate to aspects of events and actors, or to aspects of news gathering and processing:[12]
Values in news actors and events:
- Frequency: Events that occur suddenly and fit well with the news organization's schedule are more likely to be reported than those that occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night. Long-term trends are not likely to receive much coverage.
- Timeliness: Events that have only just happened, are current, ongoing, or are about to happen are newsworthy.[5]
- Familiarity: To do with people or places close to the target audience. Others prefer the term Proximity for this news value, which includes geographical and cultural proximity (see "meaningfulness").[5]
- Negativity: Bad news is more newsworthy than good news. Sometimes described as "the basic news value."[12] Conversely, it has also been suggested that Positivity is a news value in certain cases (such as sports news, science news, feel-good tabloid stories).
- Conflict: Opposition of people or forces resulting in a dramatic effect. Events with conflict are often quite newsworthy. Sometimes included in Negativity rather than listed as a separate news value.[5]
- Unexpectedness: Events that are out of the ordinary, unexpected, or rare are more newsworthy than routine, unsurprising events.[12][5]
- Unambiguity: Events whose implications are clear make for better copy than those that are open to more than one interpretation, or where any understanding of the implications depends on first understanding the complex background in which the events take place.[12]
- Personalization: Events that can be portrayed as the actions of individuals will be more attractive than one in which there is no such "human interest." Personalization is about whether an event can be contextualised in personal terms (affecting or involving specific, "ordinary" people, not the generalised masses).
- Meaningfulness: This relates to the sense of identification the audience has with the topic. "Cultural proximity" is a factor here—events concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the same preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different preoccupations. A related term is Relevance, which is about the relevance of the event as regards the target readers/viewers own lives or how close it is to their experiences. Impact refers more generally to an event's impact, on the target audience, or on others. An event with significant consequences (high impact) is newsworthy.[5]
- Eliteness: Events concerned with global powers receive more attention than those concerned with less influential nations. Events concerned with the rich, powerful, famous and infamous get more coverage. Also includes the eliteness of sources – sometimes called Attribution.[12]
- Superlativeness: Events with a large scale or scope or with high intensity are newsworthy.[12][5]
- Consonance: Events that fit with the media's expectations and preconceptions receive more coverage than those that defy them (and for which they are thus unprepared). Note this appears to conflict with unexpectedness above. However, consonance really refers to the media's readiness to report an item. Consonance has also been defined as relating to editors' stereotypes and their mental scripts for how events typically proceed.[12]
Values in the news process:
- Continuity: A story that is already in the news gathers a kind of inertia. This is partly because the media organizations are already in place to report the story, and partly because previous reportage may have made the story more accessible to the public (making it less ambiguous).
- Composition: Stories must compete with one another for space in the media. For instance, editors may seek to provide a balance of different types of coverage, so that if there is an excess of foreign news for instance, the least important foreign story may have to make way for an item concerned with the domestic news. In this way the prominence given to a story depends not only on its own news values but also on those of competing stories.[3]
- Competition: Commercial or professional competition between media may lead journalists to endorse the news value given to a story by a rival.
- Co-option: A story that is only marginally newsworthy in its own right may be covered if it is related to a major running story.[12]
- Prefabrication: A story that is marginal in news terms but written and available may be selected ahead of a much more newsworthy story that must be researched and written from the ground up.[12]
- Predictability: An event is more likely to be covered if it has been pre-scheduled.[12]
- Story impact: The impact of a published story (not the event), for example whether it is being shared widely (sometimes called Shareability), read, liked, commented-on. To be qualified as shareable, a story arguably has to be simple, emotional, unexpected and triggered. Engaging with such analytics is now an important part of newsroom practice.
- Time constraints: Traditional news media such as radio, television and daily newspapers have strict deadlines and a short production cycle, which selects for items that can be researched and covered quickly.
- Logistics: Although eased by the availability of global communications even from remote regions, the ability to deploy and control production and reporting staff, and functionality of technical resources can determine whether a story is covered.[11]
- Data: Media need to back up all of their stories with data in order to remain relevant and reliable. Reporters prefer to look at raw data in order to be able to take an unbiased perspective. An alternative term is Facticity – the favouring of facts and figures in hard news.[12]
One of the key differences in relation to these news values is whether they relate to events or stories. For example, composition and co-option both relate to the published news story. These are news values that concern how news stories fit with the other stories around them. The aim here is to ensure a balanced spread of stories with minimal duplication across a news program or edition.[14] Such news values are qualitatively different from news values that relate to aspects of events, such as Eliteness (the elite status of news actors or sources) or Proximity (the closeness of the event's location to the target audience).
Audience perceptions of news
[edit]Conventional models concentrate on what the journalist perceives as news. But the news process is a two-way transaction, involving both news producer (the journalist) and the news receiver (the audience), although the boundary between the two is rapidly blurring with the growth of citizen journalism and interactive media. Little has been done to define equivalent factors that determine audience perception of news. This is largely because it would appear impossible to define a common factor, or factors, that generate interest in a mass audience. Basing his judgement on many years as a newspaper journalist Hetherington states that: "...anything which threatens people's peace, prosperity and well being is news and likely to make headlines."[15]
Whyte-Venables suggests audiences may interpret news as a risk signal.[16] Psychologists and primatologists have shown that apes and humans constantly monitor the environment for information that may signal the possibility of physical danger or threat to the individual's social position. This receptiveness to risk signals is a powerful and virtually universal survival mechanism. A "risk signal" is characterized by two factors, an element of change (or uncertainty) and the relevance of that change to the security of the individual. The same two conditions are observed to be characteristic of news. The news value of a story, if defined in terms of the interest it carries for an audience, is determined by the degree of change it contains and the relevance that change has for the individual or group. Analysis shows that journalists and publicists manipulate both the element of change and relevance ('security concern') to maximize, or some cases play down, the strength of a story.
Security concern is proportional to the relevance of the story for the individual, his or her family, social group and societal group, in declining order. At some point there is a Boundary of Relevance, beyond which the change is no longer perceived to be relevant, or newsworthy. This boundary may be manipulated by journalists, power elites and communicators seeking to encourage audiences to exclude, or embrace, certain groups: for instance, to distance a home audience from the enemy in time of war, or conversely, to highlight the plight of a distant culture so as to encourage support for aid programs.[17][better source needed]
In 2018, Hal Pashler and Gail Heriot published a study showing that perceptions of newsworthiness tend to be contaminated by a political usefulness bias. In other words, individuals tend to view stories that give them "ammunition" for their political views as more newsworthy. They give credence to their own views.[18]
Evolutionary perspectives
[edit]An evolutionary psychology explanation for why negative news have a higher news value than positive news starts with the empirical observation that the human perceptive system and lower level brain functions have difficulty distinguishing between media stimuli and real stimuli. These lower level brain mechanisms which function on a subconscious level make basic evaluations of perceptive stimuli, focus attention on important stimuli, and start basic emotional reactions. Research has also found that the brain differentiates between negative and positive stimuli and reacts quicker and more automatically to negative stimuli which are also better remembered. This likely has evolutionary explanations with it often being important to quickly focus attention on, evaluate, and quickly respond to threats. While the reaction to a strong negative stimulus is to avoid, a moderately negative stimulus instead causes curiosity and further examination. Negative media news is argued to fall into the latter category which explains their popularity. Lifelike audiovisual media are argued to have particularly strong effects compared to reading.[19]
Women have on average stronger avoidance reactions to moderately negative stimuli. Men and women also differ on average in how they enjoy, evaluate, remember, comprehend, and identify with the people in news depending on if the news are negatively or positively framed. The stronger avoidance reaction to moderately negative stimuli has been explained as it being the role of men in evolutionary history to investigate and potentially respond aggressively to threats while women and children withdrew. It has been claimed that negative news are framed according to male preferences by the often male journalists who cover such news and that a more positive framing may attract a larger female audience.[19] However, other scholars have urged caution as regards evolutionary psychology's claims about gender differences.[20]
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ^ Boyd, Andrew (1994). Broadcast journalism: Techniques of radio and TV news (3rd ed.). Oxford, UK: Focal Press. ISBN 978-0-7506-1760-4. OCLC 32855888.
- ^ Patrick, Rhianna; McLaughlin, Julie; King-Smith, Leah; Schultz, Tristan; Thomson, Tj; Dezuanni, Michael (29 November 2024). "Unlearning journalism through decolonising, Indigenous approaches". Journalism. doi:10.1177/14648849241305363. ISSN 1464-8849.
- ^ a b c d e Galtung, Johan; Holmboe Ruge, Mari (1965). "The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers". Journal of Peace Research. 2 (1): 64–91. doi:10.1177/002234336500200104. JSTOR 423011. S2CID 55063363.
- ^ Haagerup, Ulrik (18 January 2019). "Academic who defined news principles says journalists are too negative". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 May 2024.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Bednarek, Monika; Caple, Helen (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create newsworthiness. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190653934.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-065393-4.
- ^ "Discursive News Values Analysis".
- ^ Harcup, Tony; O'Neill, Deirdre (2001). "What is news?: Galtung and Ruge revisited" (PDF). Journalism Studies. 2 (2): 261–280. doi:10.1080/14616700118449. ISSN 1461-670X.
- ^ Harcup, Tony; O'Neill, Deirdre (2016). "What is news?: News values revisited (again)". Journalism Studies. 18 (12): 1470–1488. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2016.1150193. S2CID 147241691.
- ^ Bednarek, Monika (2016). "Investigating evaluation and news values in news items that are shared through social media". Corpora. 11 (2): 227–257. doi:10.3366/cor.2016.0093.
- ^ Ryan, Charlotte (1991). Prime time activism: Media strategies for grassroots organizing. Boston: South End Press. p. 31.
- ^ a b Schlesinger, Philip (1987). Putting 'reality' together: BBC News (2nd ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-416-90190-0. Originally published as Schlesinger, Philip (1978). Putting 'reality' together: BBC News. London: Constable. ISBN 978-0-09-462040-7.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Bell, Allan (1991). The language of news media. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-16434-0.
- ^ Caple, Helen; Bednarek, Monika (December 2013). "Delving into the discourse: Approaches to news values in journalism studies and beyond". Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
- ^ Brighton, Paul; Foy, Dennis (2007). News values. London: Sage. pp. 26.
- ^ Hetherington, Alastair (25 October 1985). News, newspapers and television. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. p. 40. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-18000-4. ISBN 978-0-333-38606-4.
- ^ Whyte-Venables, John (4 July 2012). What is news? (3rd ed.). Willow Publishing. ASIN B008HOADC6. Revised from Venables, John (1993). What is news?. Kings Ripton, UK: Elm Publications. ISBN 978-1-85450-052-6. OCLC 30437924.
- ^ Landau, Joel (2016). Source journalism and news values. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-365-44689-4. OL 17372971W. [self-published source]
- ^ Pashler, Harold; Heriot, Gail (2018). "Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias". Royal Society Open Science. 5 (8) 172239. Bibcode:2018RSOS....572239P. doi:10.1098/rsos.172239. ISSN 2054-5703. PMC 6124072. PMID 30224994. SSRN 3225878.
- ^ a b Grabe, Maria Elizabeth (24 November 2011). "News as reality-inducing, survival-relevant, and gender-specific stimuli". In Roberts, S. Craig (ed.). Applied evolutionary psychology. Oxford University Press. pp. 361–377. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586073.003.0022. ISBN 978-0-19-958607-3.
- ^ Cameron, Deborah (2010). "Sex/gender, language and the new biologism". Applied Linguistics. 31 (2): 173–192. doi:10.1093/applin/amp022.
References
[edit]- Gans, Herbert J. (2004) [1979]. Deciding what's news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Medill School of Journalism visions of the American press (25th anniversary ed.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-8101-2237-6.
- Östgaard, Einar (1965). "Factors influencing the flow of news" (PDF). Journal of Peace Research. 2 (1): 39–63. doi:10.1177/002234336500200103. ISSN 0022-3433. JSTOR 423010.
- Schulz, Winfried Friedrich (1982). "News structure and people's awareness of political events". Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands). 30 (3): 139–153. doi:10.1177/001654928203000301. ISSN 0016-5492.
External links
[edit]News values
View on GrokipediaFundamentals
Definition and Core Concepts
News values are the criteria journalists and editors use to evaluate the newsworthiness of events, information, or developments, guiding the selection of stories from an overwhelming volume of potential content. These values function as subjective yet patterned benchmarks in the journalistic process, prioritizing material that aligns with audience interests, resource constraints, and professional norms. Empirical analyses, such as those examining news coverage patterns, indicate that stories scoring highly on multiple news values are more likely to be selected and amplified, reflecting a gatekeeping mechanism that filters reality into reportable narratives.[4][5] Core traditional news values, distilled from decades of journalistic practice and academic study, include timeliness, which favors recent or impending events; impact, assessing the scale of consequences on affected populations; proximity, emphasizing geographic, cultural, or emotional closeness to the audience; prominence, involving elite persons or institutions; conflict, highlighting opposition, tension, or controversy; novelty or unexpectedness, capturing the unusual or deviant; and human interest, evoking emotional resonance through personal stories or relatable experiences. These elements are not exhaustive or universally fixed but emerge from observational patterns in news output, with studies showing their compensatory nature—deficiencies in one value can be offset by strengths in others.[6][7][8] The foundational theoretical framework originates from Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge's 1965 analysis of foreign news in Norwegian media, which identified twelve additive factors—such as frequency (short-interval events), threshold (scale exceeding perceptual limits), unambiguity (clear interpretation), meaningfulness (cultural relevance), consonance (expected alignment with worldview), continuity (ongoing stories), and negativity (bad news)—to explain selection biases. Their model, grounded in psychological and structural principles rather than prescriptive rules, underscores how news values distort events toward simplicity and elite-centric perspectives, a pattern corroborated in subsequent cross-national studies despite cultural variations. While critiqued for overemphasizing Western biases, this approach remains influential for revealing causal drivers in news production over ad hoc judgments.[3][5]Theoretical Role in Journalism
News values constitute a core theoretical framework in journalism studies for elucidating the criteria that determine an event's newsworthiness and its subsequent selection for media dissemination. They operationalize the gatekeeping process, whereby journalists and editors systematically filter an abundance of potential stories to prioritize those aligning with established factors such as timeliness, impact, and proximity, thereby shaping the informational environment available to audiences. This conceptualization traces to foundational gatekeeping theory, initially formalized by Kurt Lewin in 1943 and adapted to newsrooms by David Manning White in 1950, who observed editors rejecting wire service items based on subjective yet patterned judgments of relevance and interest.[9] The most empirically grounded articulation of news values emerged from Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge's 1965 content analysis of foreign news coverage in Norwegian media, identifying 12 factors—including frequency (events with immediate consequences), threshold (scale of impact), unambiguity (clear interpretation), and meaning (personal or cultural relevance)—that cumulatively and compensatorily elevate an event's likelihood of becoming news. Their additivity hypothesis posits that events fulfilling more factors receive greater prominence, while complementarity suggests certain factors (e.g., positivity versus negativity) rarely coexist in reporting, explaining patterns like the prevalence of elite-nation and conflict-oriented stories. This structural approach enables predictive modeling of news selection, revealing causal mechanisms such as cultural proximity bias, where events closer to the reporting nation's worldview dominate coverage.[3][1] Theoretically, news values extend beyond mere selection to inform critiques of journalistic routines and their societal implications, integrating with paradigms like agenda-setting by highlighting how prioritized stories influence public salience of issues. Empirical studies validate their role in consistent cross-media patterns, though refinements account for contextual variations, such as digital amplification of shareability or audience metrics altering traditional thresholds. Galtung later updated the framework in 2014 to emphasize peace journalism, advocating values like empathy to counter violence-prone selections inherent in negativity and elite focus, underscoring news values' potential for normative reform in fostering balanced reporting.[1][3]Historical Development
Early Practical Origins
The practical origins of news values arose in the 17th century with the commercialization of printed news in Europe, where publishers curated content from handwritten newsletters (avvisi) to fill limited pages and attract paying readers. Early corantos, such as those printed in Amsterdam starting in 1618 and imported to England by 1621, prioritized dispatches on military conflicts, royal decrees, and trade disruptions, reflecting an intuitive emphasis on timeliness—events no more than weeks old—and consequence, as these held direct implications for merchants and statesmen whose subscriptions funded production.[10] [11] Selection was pragmatic, constrained by reliance on slow postal networks and censors, favoring verifiable foreign intelligence over domestic trivia to minimize risks while maximizing perceived utility.[12] By the 18th century, colonial American printers adapted these criteria to local contexts, as in James Franklin's New-England Courant (1721), which blended imported European news with Boston-specific reports on shipping arrivals and scandals, applying proximity and unexpectedness to sustain readership in resource-scarce weeklies.[13] Limited to four pages and printed on rudimentary presses, editors like Benjamin Franklin in the Pennsylvania Gazette (from 1729) triaged copy by impact—favoring events affecting commerce or public order—implicitly balancing informativeness against entertainment to compete with oral traditions and pamphlets.[14] This gatekeeping evolved as a craft honed by trial, where poor choices led to low circulation, embedding values like elite involvement (coverage of governors or clergy) without formal theory. The 19th-century penny press in the United States intensified practical application amid technological advances like steam-powered presses, enabling daily editions for mass audiences. Benjamin Day's New York Sun, launched September 3, 1833, at one cent per copy, shifted from partisan advocacy to neutral, sensational local fare—police reports, fires, and murders—prioritizing human interest and conflict to achieve circulations exceeding 15,000 by 1834, far surpassing six-cent rivals.[15] James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald (1835) refined this by dispatching reporters to crime scenes, valuing timeliness and proximity over elite sources, which boosted sales through reader identification with ordinary victims.[16] These innovations, driven by advertising revenue replacing subsidies, formalized news judgment as a profit-oriented process, where values like novelty (e.g., the 1835 "Great Moon Hoax" serialization) tested audience thresholds for credibility versus curiosity.[14]Key Academic Formulations
The seminal academic formulation of news values emerged from Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge's 1965 study analyzing foreign news coverage in Norwegian newspapers, identifying 12 factors influencing newsworthiness: frequency (events aligning with news cycles), threshold (events exceeding intensity levels), unambiguity (clear, non-abstract outcomes), meaning (familiarity and cultural relevance), consonance (alignment with audience expectations), unexpectedness (deviation from norms), continuity (ongoing stories), composition (balance in news mix), reference to elite nations (involvement of powerful countries), reference to persons (personal impact), negativity (adverse events), and personalizability (human-scale framing).[17] Their model posited three hypotheses: additivity (more factors increase selection probability), organic independence (factors interrelate but operate distinctly), and a distortion hypothesis (selected events are amplified in traits like negativity).[18] This quantitative approach, tested on crises in Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus, emphasized structural biases in international reporting, though later critiques noted its focus on elite Western perspectives limited generalizability.[5] Building on Galtung and Ruge, Pamela Shoemaker developed a theory of newsworthiness rooted in deviance from social norms and event significance for societal functioning, arguing that news prioritizes deviations in size, intensity, or proximity to audiences, as well as events threatening or enhancing social order.[19] In her 1996 work and collaborations like Shoemaker and Cohen (2006), she framed news values as deriving from biological imperatives (e.g., survival threats via conflict or novelty) and cultural hierarchies (e.g., elite status amplifying prominence), with empirical support from cross-national content analyses showing consistent patterns in deviance-based selection.[20] This formulation shifted emphasis toward audience cognition and gatekeeping dynamics, positing news as a constructed commodity balancing economic viability with informational utility, though it has been critiqued for underemphasizing cultural variability in deviance thresholds.[21] Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill revisited and expanded these frameworks in their 2001 and 2016 studies of British journalism, retaining core elements like negativity, exclusivity, and bad news while adding contemporary factors such as entertainment (amusing or celebrity-driven content), power elite (elite wrongdoing or decisions), and shareability (social media virality potential).[22] Their taxonomy, derived from practitioner interviews and content audits post-9/11 and during digital shifts, included 10-12 values like relevance (audience impact), magnitude (scale of event), and novelty (unusualness), arguing for contextual adaptability amid market pressures, with evidence from case studies showing digital platforms elevating surprise and human interest over traditional thresholds.[23] Unlike earlier models' universalism, Harcup and O'Neill highlighted ideological influences on application, such as underreporting structural inequalities unless framed as elite scandals, though their UK-centric data invites caution in extrapolating to non-Western contexts. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple's 2017 discourse-analytic approach in "The Discourse of News Values" reconceptualized values as linguistically constructed rather than inherent event traits, examining how journalistic language (e.g., evaluative adjectives, quantification) realizes authenticity, impact, and attitudinal alignment in multimodal news texts.[24] Drawing from corpus linguistics of English-language outlets, they identified discursive strategies like intensification for negativity or personalization for human interest, empirically validating overlaps with prior lists while critiquing static taxonomies for ignoring production routines; this perspective underscores news values' relativity across genres, with applications in analyzing bias in framing climate or conflict stories. These formulations collectively inform gatekeeping theory, revealing persistent tensions between objective criteria and subjective interpretations shaped by institutional norms.Catalog of News Values
Traditional News Values
Traditional news values constitute the foundational criteria journalists apply to evaluate events for newsworthiness, rooted in practices from the era of print and early broadcast media. These values prioritize attributes that align with audience curiosity and the operational demands of timely reporting, such as recency and relevance, shaping news selection processes since the professionalization of journalism around the late 19th century.[6] The standard set of traditional news values, drawn from journalistic education and editorial routines, encompasses timeliness, proximity, prominence, impact, conflict, human interest, and novelty. A story's newsworthiness intensifies when it satisfies multiple values, enabling editors to filter vast information flows efficiently.[6][7]- Timeliness: Events unfolding recently or with immediate developments command priority, as news derives its essence from novelty and urgency in fast-paced cycles. For example, real-time updates on crises like natural disasters outrank historical analyses.[6][7]
- Proximity: Occurrences close to the audience's locale or cultural sphere heighten interest, fostering a sense of direct implication; a local factory closure garners more attention than a distant equivalent.[6][7]
- Prominence: Involvement of recognized figures, institutions, or landmarks amplifies appeal through established public recognition, as seen in coverage of actions by political leaders or celebrities.[6][7]
- Impact: Consequences affecting numerous individuals or altering societal conditions elevate priority, such as economic policies influencing employment for thousands.[6][7]
- Conflict: Disputes, rivalries, or adversarial dynamics inherently attract scrutiny, reflecting innate interest in contention over harmony, evident in political debates or legal battles.[6][7]
- Human Interest: Narratives evoking emotion through personal triumphs, tragedies, or quirks resonate universally, often sustaining coverage beyond factual import, like stories of individual resilience amid adversity.[6][7]
- Novelty: Anomalous or unforeseen elements disrupt expectations, capturing attention via surprise, as in rare phenomena or inversions of norms like "man bites dog" rather than the commonplace.[6][7]
Emerging and Contextual Values
Emerging news values have arisen primarily from the shift to digital platforms, where audience engagement and algorithmic amplification influence selection processes alongside traditional criteria. Shareability, the likelihood that a story will generate widespread dissemination via social media shares, comments, or virality, has gained prominence as newsrooms integrate real-time metrics like clicks and interactions into gatekeeping.[22] [25] This value reflects the economic pressures of digital journalism, where high-engagement content sustains traffic and revenue, as evidenced by studies showing journalists prioritizing stories with proven social traction.[26] Other digital-era additions include audio-visual fit, favoring events adaptable to video, graphics, or immersive formats like VR, which enhance viewer retention on platforms such as YouTube or TikTok.[27] [2] Entertainment value, encompassing lighter fare like celebrity anecdotes or human-interest narratives with emotional or humorous appeal, often supplements harder news to boost dwell time and shares, particularly in fragmented audiences.[22] Public response, incorporating anticipated or observed audience reactions from polls, social feedback, or analytics, further emerges as a feedback loop shaping coverage continuity.[1] Contextual values adapt news selection to specific environments, such as platform constraints, cultural norms, or institutional agendas, rendering newsworthiness situational rather than universal. In state-controlled media, for example, alignment with official narratives—prioritizing "good news" and relevance to policy goals over conflict—overrides negativity, as seen in analyses of Chinese VR productions where 63.2% of stories emphasized positive outcomes.[27] During crises like pandemics, health impact or scientific novelty may elevate stories irrespective of proximity, while in hyperlocal digital outlets, community resonance trumps elite prominence.[1] These variations underscore how external factors, including regulatory pressures or technological affordances, dynamically recalibrate values, with empirical research confirming their role in diverse global contexts.[28]Applications in Practice
In Traditional Media Gatekeeping
In traditional media, gatekeeping refers to the editorial process by which journalists and editors evaluate and select news stories from a vast pool of potential items, guided by news values to fit the limited space in print publications or airtime in broadcasts. This mechanism ensures that only stories deemed most newsworthy—based on criteria such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, conflict, and impact—reach audiences, as the finite nature of traditional outlets necessitates prioritization. David Manning White's seminal 1950 study, "The 'Gate Keeper': A Case Study in the Selection of News," analyzed a newspaper wire editor's decisions over a month, revealing that subjective judgments aligned with these values led to the rejection of most incoming dispatches; for instance, stories lacking perceived public interest or political significance were dismissed, with the editor passing roughly 40% of items while citing reasons like "not important" or "dull."[29][30] News values function as practical heuristics in this gatekeeping, applied at multiple stages from wire services to final publication. In newspapers, editors might elevate a local government scandal due to its proximity and conflict elements, displacing international events unless they exhibit exceptional impact or involve prominent figures, as observed in content analyses of editorial selections. Broadcast gatekeeping similarly prioritizes visual and immediate elements; producers select stories with high timeliness for evening news slots, often favoring human-interest angles to maximize audience engagement within rigid time constraints. These applications, while consistent with empirical patterns in newsroom observations, demonstrate how values like novelty can amplify unusual events, such as disasters, over routine policy developments.[31][32] Empirical research underscores the causal role of news values in shaping traditional media output, yet highlights limitations including subjective interpretation and potential biases. Studies of news selection processes show that gatekeepers' application of values correlates with coverage patterns, with higher-value stories receiving disproportionate attention; for example, analyses of print media reveal that prominence drives 20-30% more space allocation to elite actors compared to grassroots events. However, gatekeeping introduces ideological distortions, as evidenced by partisan asymmetries in story selection—outlets tend to amplify press releases from ideologically aligned sources while suppressing others, reflecting gatekeepers' personal and institutional leanings rather than neutral value assessment. This systemic filtering, prevalent in mainstream Western media, privileges narratives consistent with prevailing editorial cultures, often underrepresenting dissenting viewpoints despite equivalent newsworthiness.[33][34][35]
