Lecture 9 - News Values

What makes a headline in the news? Why are some stories given more attention than others and seen to be more important news? "If it bleeds it leads" is a quote heard many times to describe common top news stories. What makes people so interested in these stories of war, murder and tragedy? In our week nine lecture we discovered the values of news stories that make a big splash as opposed to a tiny ripple. News values as defined by Wikipedia is 'how much prominence a news story is given by a media outlet, and the attention it is given by the audience'.

News Values:
1. Impact - shock or 'wow' factor
2. Audience identification - interests people
3. Pragmatics - Ethics, practicality, current affairs
4. Source Influence - PR (press release)

These four values seem a good starting point for deciding what story to place at the beginning of TV news or a newspaper. If we look at the headline news for today of the Brisbane Times the two major stories I found were:

1. The ongoing investigation into the murder of Brisbane mother-of-three Allison Baden-Clay
2. The win of Graham Quirk for Brisbane mayor in last weekend's election

The first story fits the quote "If it bleeds it leads" quite perfectly and if we look at its news values it has all four mentioned above. Because it is a murder it carries the 'shock' factor, and audiences identify with it particularly because it has happened here in Brisbane. The investigation has been going on for thirteen days in which police have conducted press releases and kept the story an ongoing affair. The injustice of the killing of a loved mother-of-three is enough to get anyone a little teary.We can certainly see that this story fits with the news values above.

Graham Quirk as the new Brisbane mayor hasn't the 'wow' factor compared to the first story but it is certainly of great importance to the people of Brisbane and a recent affair.

News values have changed and varied over time and were not always those ones shown above. In the lecture we looked at several people's theories as to what makes a story newsworthy. Galtung and Ruge were among the first to come up with a set of values to explain what made headlines. Below are their twelve suggested values.

 

Galtung and Ruge's three hypothesis:

Additivity Hypothesis -  The more factors an event satisfies the higher probability it becomes news

Complementarity Hypothesis - The factors will tend to exclude each other

Exclusion Hypothesis - Events that satsify few or none of the factors will not become news

Golding and Elliot  added their thoughts in 1979 with some interesting additions:

1. Drama
2. Visual attractiveness
3. Entertainment
4. Importance
5. Size
6. Proximity
7. Negativity
8. Brevity
9. Recency
10. Elites
11. Personalities

O'Neill and Harcup have narrowed Galtung and Ruge's intial newsworthiness ideas down to ten suggestions.

Though the 'newsworthiness' of a story has clearly changed over time and even varies from person to person I think we can see some key similarities between them all. Values appear to change rungs on the list rather than appear and disappear entirely. On one of that last lecture slides it was written, 'what do you think is newsworthy?' In my opinion O'Neill and Harcup's version of newsworthiness is the best model and it should be noted that this also is the most modern model I have posted and so relates best to today's news media.

Here is my list in descending order of what I think the news values of today are:

1. Impact/ Magnitude - Who and how many people it effects
2. Importance - Stories that are relevant to the audience
3. Proximity - How close it is to the audience
4. Recency - How recent the story is 
5. The Elite - Concerning the powerful, influential
6. Surprise - A stories shock value
7. Entertainment - How much it entertains
8. Celebrity - Stories about the famour
9. Negativity - Conflict and tragedy
10. Good News - Positive overtones that make the audience feel good