Salutations all. I ought to explain here, that I won't be writing my posts in point form anymore. It was time for me to face the facts: it looks terrible, especially because the 'points' are just sentences with a hyphen at the start. I will eventually rid my earlier posts of this troublesome nuisance, but for now, this post will be a teaser of what is to come.. Enjoy. :)
The degree of prominence media outlets give to stories, and the attention payed to them by the audience constitutes news values. In other words, the measure of how 'newsworthy' a story is, is based on how much interest people take in it--if no one cares about a particular event, it won't appear. It's because of news values that only a small amount of stories that are happening, are published.
Current determiners of news values are a story's impact, audience and the pragmatics of it. To have news value, stories must be hard-hitting, interesting and relevant to the audience (so they will buy into it). In addition, the source of the news i.e. press releases and ethics, influence an item's news value.
The inverted pyramid reappears: the more newsworthy a story is, the earlier it appears. "If it bleeds, it leads"- gore, violence and tragedies tend to lead. (This is a common complaint of my parents- "There's too much violence in the media. We don't want to see that.") So I guess an argument can be made that this also puts people off, therein decreasing the item's news value.
News values differ across countries and cultures. We can also see a difference in news values between commercial and public media outlets, i.e channel nine's focus on local areas in Brisbane etc. versus SBS's coverage of international stories over insignificant local ones. With local media outlets, generally, "If it's local, it leads"...which doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Harold Evans, the editor of The Sunday Times calls editors the human sieves of the torrent of news, saying that for them, a sense of news values is more important than their command of language. But knowing what is newsworthy is dependent on practise and instinct, rather than logic and there is no formal code, as it is transient, and news-service specific.
International news values: negativity (blood), proximity, recency, currency (ongoing investigations etc.), uniqueness ('dog bites man' is old hat: 'man bites dog' has news value), simplicity (faster to absorb in our fast-paced modern era), predictability, presence of elite nations or people (if the Pope wears a sombrero, it will be more newsworthy than me wearing one) and where it is an exclusive. Some others: drama, visual attractiveness, entertainment value, importance (I can't believe this is just an 'other', what is the world coming to?), brevity, educational value, timeliness*, emotional value, controversy, surprise, positive news, agenda of news service, celebrification of the journalist (how high-profile the reporter is), surprise, follow-up.
*I thought I ought to throw in a reference to Mothers Day somewhere in here, as it would be a very timely inclusion, and that is a news value. Happy Mothers Day!
In theory, the more news values one story has, the higher the newsworthiness (additivity hypothesis). Maybe it's like having all the different colours and flavours of skittles or Jelly beans (throw-back to the week two lecture!!). But complemenarity hypothesis states that these factors tend to exclude each other.
If you thought that was the end of it...another model of news values for good measure:
In descending order of news value-significance, proximity (incl. historical and cultural background), conflict, human interest, novelty and fame/prominence (celebrities doing stuff, pretty much).
To the nitty-gritty now, what are the threats to news values? With the current rapid production of the news because of fast technology, there is less research being done, leading to erroneous news. This can be called 'churnalism'- the news cartel is hyper-commercialised and mass-produced, causing one stagnant viewpoint to predominate and bad quality of the end-product. PR battles with journalism to make their client appear in a better light, distorting the truth. Additional to all these: ethics, geographic impossibility of reporting and censure may effect news values.
Not to mention the massive power-shift between the audience and the media. With all the ways that the former "audience" can broadcast themselves and create their own content, the public are now deciding their own news values. Power to the people, I say!
-Bon
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