News Values

Introduction

When we talk about ‘news values’ we are referring to the ideas or assumptions which form the ideological background to the work of the journalist and news editor. These values are not always clear to the casual observer; many of them are absent from formal discourses of journalism and remain hidden or implicit. It is mostly the practices of journalism that reveal the underlying values which drive individual journalists to collect certain types of material.

News values have been categorised by a number of writers. It is often the case that each new defintion of news values will build on the list outlined by earlier writers. In Using the Media, Denis McShane sets out five central tenets which journalists are likely to follow in their news-gathering operations. These are conflict, danger to the community, the unusual, scandal, and individualism. Brian Dutton, in The Media, produced a list of twelve of the ‘most significant’ news values. This was based partly on earlier work, such as that carried out by Galtung and Ruge in 1973. The list may be summarised as followed:

  1. Frequency – This refers to something Dutton calls ‘the time span taken by the event’. He cites the example of murders, which happen suddenly and whose meaning is established quickly. More lengthy structural developments in society are outside the ‘frequency’ of the daily papers and achieve notice only through the releasde of certain figures on a particular day.
  2. Threshold – This means the ’size’ of an event. There is a threshold below which an event will fail to be considered worthy of attention, and will not be reported.
  3. Unambiguity – Although events do not have to be ’simple’, the range of possible meanings they are able to generate must remain limited. In this way, the event will be ‘accessible’ to the public.
  4. Meaningfulness – Dutton divides this into two categories, following Galtung and Ruge, who called this news value ‘familiarity’. The first category is called cultural proximity, in which the event agrees with the outlook of a specific culture. The second is relevance, where events will be reported and discussed if they seem to have an impact on the ‘home’ culture. This impact is usually represented in terms of some type of threat.
  5. Consonance or ‘correspondence’, where the familiar (that which meets our expectations) is more likely to be thought important than the unfamiliar.
  6. Unexpectedness or ’surprise’, where it is the rarity of an event which leads to its circulation in the public domain. Galtung and Ruge appeared to think that this category was an important antidote, a kind of balance, to the tendency for news to be predictable, but Dutton notes that the ‘newness’ of an unexpected event is usually processed through a familiar context. Unexpectedness has to operate through the categories of the meaningful and the consonant.
  7. Continuity – This is where a story, once it has achieved importance and is ‘running’, will continue to be covered for some time.
  8. Composition – Most news outlets will attempt to ‘balance’ the reporting of events, so that if for example there has been a great deal of bad or gloomy news, some items of a more positive nature will be added. Balance may also be achieved if news happens to come overwhelmingly from one source over a certain period. An example may be a period when most news comes from abroad; ‘balance’ will be sought by adding some items which reflect the domestic scene.
  9. Reference to elite nations – Elections, natural disasters, wars and other significant events, are more likely to be reported in the Western press if they occur in the developed world. A disaster which involves loss of life will not automatically qualify as important news – this depends on a kind of sliding scale of importance given to the number of deaths, measured against the country in which they occur. The loss of a few lives in a Western country may achieve recognition, whereas a considerable number of deaths in a Third World country would need to have occurred to achieve similar recognition. This is an example of events having to attain a certain ‘threshold’. Of course, it is possible that this value could operate in reverse, in exactly those countries regarded as ‘less important’ by the Western press.
  10. Reference to elite persons – The famous and the powerful are often treated as being of greater importance than those who are regarded as ‘ordinary’, in the sense that their decisions and actions are supposed to affect large numbers of people. In addition, the social activities of such people are given importance because these combine the public’s supposed interest in the famous with general interest in special events.
  11. Personalisation – Events are often seen as the actions of people as individuals. An institution and its functions may be ‘personalised’ by referring to a prominent individual who is associated with it.
  12. Negativity – What we sometimes refer to as ‘bad news’ is often good business for the newspapers and news programmes. The threshold is lower for reporting bad news than for good news; such news is also usually unambiguous, consonant, and occurs in a short space of time.

© S Price Media Studies (2nd Ed) pp 218-219