Week 9 : News Values

I am almost half way through this course, and in every lecture I have learnt something new. Few months back, I just knew that journalism is all about writing and reporting. I thought only science and commerce was about research and theories, but looking into this field, it has many deeper aspects and theories, written by many scholars, journalists, media workers and many more.

This week we were introduced to a new concept called  “News Values”.

What are News Values?

To be specific, News values are something, which determines the importance of a news story in media, which leaves an impact on public and is relatively interesting to read. In a way, we as journalism students are a part of it. That is we all blog about our lectures, and many a times, we just include those points which are important.

News values vary accordingly in different countries or different news services. In short, it’s not widespread and differs across various culture and places.

A.Boyd (1994) has defined news values as “News Journalism has a broad agreed set of values, often referred to as newsworthiness”.  In 1965 Galtung and Ruge, in a study analyzed more than twelve factors of newsworthiness, which specifically describes newsworthiness. Some of the factors are Recency of a news story,

Negativity i.e., the bad news like death, disaster and so on, closeness to home that is how close is the place geographically, also the Unexpectedness of the story and so on.

Many writers have reviewed the analysis of Galtung and Ruge. One of the most interesting and subtle review was by Murray Masterson (1995), who constructed the news values into “big 6”.

They are

1.     Significance meaning the Impact of the story on audience

2.    Proximity that is historical emotional and cultural influence,

3.    Conflict relating to war, disasters, celebrities and so on.

4.    Human interest

5.    Novelty that is the freshness of the news

6.    Prominence of the news story.

Now speaking about the threats, there are three types of threats to Newsworthiness that is dominance of commercialization in media, influence of public relations and lastly journalism reality/ ideals.

This was a short reflection on week 8 Lecture “News Values”.