Lecture 10 - News Values

In today's lecture, we looked at news values - "The degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience" - which is closely related to last lecture's topic of agenda setting.

Definitions may be nice and fancy-sounding, but really, what are news values? They are measured by their

1) Impact -> what is important to the reader? what is of interest to the audience?
2) Audience Identification -> the audience has to be able to relate with the news
3) Pragmatics -> ethics, facticity, practice - practical, current affairs, everyday
4) Source Influence -> Journalism vs PR?

News values are about "newsworthiness", which obviously differs in different media outlets and different cultures or countries. But still, a few general rules about what gets covered often and has a high news value could be identified:

"If it bleeds it leads" and its more modern little brother "If it's local it leads".

But rather than sticking to rules in determining what has news value, a journalist or editor should probably just try to listen to their imagination, rather than logic. According to Harold Evans, "a sense of news values is the first quality of editors".
We then talked about the factors that make an item newsworthy - there were quite a few of them and to make it a little more interesting I have looked at a few current news articles and tried to pin-point the factors that make them newsworthy:

Dollar dives to 10-month low -> Importance, Negativity, Relevance
Flood victims fear further pain after government decision not to lower dam levels -> Emotion, Proximity
Nicky Whelan single again -> Celebrity, (Proximity)

We also talked about the threats to news values - in particular 3 "Tensions of Newsworthiness"

-Journalism/Commercialization of media and social life
-Journalism/Public Relations
-Journalism's ideals/Journalism's reality

While talking about "lazy and incompetent journalism", the term "Churnalism" came up. I love this word-concoction and I found this awesome online-tool where you can enter newspaper articles and see how much of it is actually original and how much is "churned"!

To round off the lecture we were asked what we thought news values were going to be in the future and what for us, personally, constitutes news values. Realistically, media will have to follow market economic demand even more in the future as the media landscape changes and diversifies and thus give the audience what it wants - seemingly lighter, tabloidy stuff. But I personally believe that the media have a very important role in democratic societies and should try their hardest to educate and inform the public. Therefore I think that even really hard, complex issues should be covered - maybe in a simplified, illustrated way that may appeal to a broader public.