Lecture Nine

"News journalism has a broadly agreed set of values, often referred to as 'newsworthiness' ..."

A. Boyd 1994, (broadcast journalism).

Lecture Nine was about news values, which is basically about how newsworthy something is. Many events happen every day with tonnes of potential stories, but they don't all end up in the news. This has a lot to do with  news values, which is essentially concerned with the question: "Are people going to be interested in it and is it going to stand the test of time?"

News values differ between different news services, countries and cultures. However some news values apply universally. News values refer to how much exposure a news service gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by the audience.

"News values are one of the most opaque structures of meaning of modern society ... Journalists speak of "the news" as if the events select themselves ... yet of the millions of events which occur daily in the world, only a tiny proportion ever become visible as "potential news stories": and of this proportion, only a small fraction are actually produced as the day's news..." 

(Stuart Hall, 1973 (ex Lamble))

These seem accurate to me because there is always tragedy and negativity in the news especially. The more news values a story has, the more likely it is to become actual news. Whereas if a story has few or no news values it is unlikely that is will end up as news.

Another take on new values was Golding and Elliot's 1979 list:
- Drama
- Visual attractiveness
- Entertainment
- Importance
- Proximity
- Size
- Negativity
- Brevity
- Recency (Exclusives, scoops)
- Elites
- Personalities

When my lecturer was working in the newsroom he said the motto was, "If it bleeds, it leads." This means that if there is any involved violence, war, car accidents, celebrity deaths or other related tragedies it will usually be the top story. Local news services such as Ten or Nine News also have the motto, "If it's local, it leads". This is because they are emphasising their niches and because people are usually interested in things close to and affecting themselves.

We were told that the news values of an organisation aren't usually set down in writing and explained for, but you just get a sense of them from being in the newsroom. This is expressed in the quote below:

"A sense of news values" is the first quality of editors - they are the "human sieves of the torrent of news. This is even more important than an ability to write or their command of language. 

('The College of Osmosis', Evans, 2000)

There were other examples of news values lists but just chose to include the most all-encompassing ones, otherwise there would be too many.

We learnt about the tensions between these areas: journalism and the commercialisation of media and social life; between journalism and public relations; and between journalism's ideals and its reality.

Churnalism was something was talked about - churnalism being the when PR stories are made into news stories. This can be by taking large chunk of text from the original press release, as well as supplied photographs or footage. It is lazy journalism, but it's more common now because there are fewer journalists and so they are looking for a way to get stories when pressed for time.

Another idea discussed in this lecture was new balance of power between the media and the audience. We, the audience, now have access to new media (e.g. blogging, twitter) and can have more influence and voice our opinions. News values are also not static, they shift over time. That explains why there is no detailed and definitive list that is absolutely universal. On slow news days some things might also get prominence that usually would not. Governments often put out unpopular pieces of information on big news days hoping they'll go unnoticed, whereas they often release things they want to receive a lot of press on Sundays. This is because there are less people in the office on Sundays who need plenty of stories for Monday.

This was a great lecture for understanding why events become news. I hadn't been aware that there were specific factors mapped out that made something newsworthy, so I think this prompted me to give it more thought.