News Values

To be honest, I watched this lecture about 2 weeks ago online, and if this seems a little jumbled, it's because past me left present me lots of lovely little captions in my notes that either made no sense or are surrounded by doodles of flowers and notes that say "Look on lecture slides" I hate mysssseeeelf.


News Values, News Values, where to begin.


They are the importance placed on a story by a media outlet, and the attention that story receives from an audience. It's all about newsworthiness and agenda setting, which I will eventually dedicate an entire post to.


The In's and Out's of News Values:


- Impact- Things that are exciting, make you look twice. Say, "Gee Whiz!"
- Audience Identification- Topics that are interesting to said audience, relatable, localised. Targeted.
- Pragmatics- How ethical/factual/practical is the story?
- Source Influence- Public relations influences Journalism, it controls it, for 'the better.' Does the story comply with PR practices?


Now, there are two very important questions.


Are news values the same across news services?
Are they the same across different countries/ cultures?


Clearly the answer is NO to both, and the reason is simple. Localisation. What appeals to one demographic or locality does not appeal/ have any relevance to another. People are interested in what is around them first and foremost, we, as a society are narrow minded in this way, and media outlets use this to their advantage. If we revisit an earlier concept from this course, "If it bleeds, it leads"  and substitute it for "If it's local, it leads", we can understand localisation's importance in the media sphere.


Again, a core concept of this course can be built upon to explain current topics. The inverted pyramid can be called on to understand the process of determining newsworthiness - 5W's&H is of higher value than the other components of a story, and will be chosen first and foremost for its succinctness - this is why Twitter is at the top of the pyramid. This may also have connotations with Western news/values; we value quick and concise information at our fingertips.


Moving on.


Stemming from this concept, is the notion of Professor Johan Galtung & Ruge's quest to discover common factors/agendas that attributed to particular stories becoming headlines. Newsworthiness. In short, they came up with 12 - everything from proximity to uniqueness, and since this lists creation, it seems like every man and his dog has tried their best to shorten it. Golding and Elliot had a crack in 1979 (11 news values), then it was O'Neill and Harcup (10), followed by Murray and Masterson in 1995 (6) and finally (hopefully) Judy McGregor in 2002 at a very short four! Seems to me that everyone is in a scramble to define news values, but haven't really done anything spectacular that Galtung & Rude hadn't already done.


Apparently this blatant time-wasting isn't the only threat to newsworthiness, so is:




•Journalism / Commercialization
of media and social life
•Journalism / Public Relations
•Journalism’s ideals /
Journalism’s reality




These three above are known as the three tensions of newsworthiness, and they go hand in hand with the problems facing such worthiness:




• PR
• Crap Journalism
• Hyper-Commercialisation


The harsh realities is, with this rapid journalism, and the 24 hour news cycle, journalism is getting worse because there is just not enough time, and we fall into this trap of reusing PR releases, all the while we are nestling in the corrupt clutches of large media corporations who will stop at nothing to assure that loyalty, fact checking and giving voices to the voiceless will never be associated with journalism, (Sorry Rupey'.)

This is the price we pay for technology, for Twitter, for Facebook, for what we want.


So, what do I think tomorrow holds for news values? What do I think is newsworthy?
I'm torn. You see, while I strongly believe news should be accessible, technologically driven (for convenience) and fast, a part of me wishes that the core foundations, the bed rock of journalism should value things it did in the early days. It should be about the audience, what they need to know, or what the journalists think they should know, none of this PR crap. And while I love to indulge in the latest celebrity scandal, you can't justify it as something the audience wants, and you can't justify it in terms of journalism.


If you are having trouble understanding newsworthiness, maybe you should consider it from the other end of the spectrum. Think of a slow news day, and the sort of crap that makes it onto the front page; this is the full effect of newsworthiness, and in turn, news values.


-Shannen