News Values

News values

News values are the criteria which help to explain why photographs and events are selected

as newsworthy. Galtung and Ruge were among the first media theorists to define news values.

The list of news values below is adapted from their work. Use this list whenever you are

analysing news stories.

• Immediacy: Has it happened recently?
• Familiarity/Cultural Proximity: Is it culturally close to us in Britain?
• Amplitude: Is it a big event or one which involves large numbers of people?
• Frequency: Does the event happen often?
• Unambiguity: Is it clear and definite?
• Predictability: Did we expect it to happen?
• Surprise: Is it a rare or unexpected event?
• Continuity: Has this story already been defined as news?
• Elite nations and people: Which country has the event happened in? Does the story concern well-known people, such as celebrities?
• Personalisation: Is it a human-interest story?
• Negativity: Is it bad news?
• Balance/Composition: The story may be selected to balance other news, such as a human survival story to balance a number of stories concerning death.

                  Jeremy Tunstall adapted Galtung and Ruge’s model to TV News. He argued that in TV News:

1. The visual is given more pre-eminence. If footage is available the story may be given more prominence – the visual imperative.
2. News stories with ‘our own reporters’ conducting interviews or commentating on a story are preferred.
3. TV News covers far fewer stories than newspapers. Even the top stories are short in comparison with newspaper coverage
4. Hard news or actuality is preferred.

       Dennis McShane (1979) identified five criteria used by journalists in their seletion of news stories.

         Conflict/Hardship and danger to community/The unusual/Scandal/Individualism

Note

News Values are a theoretical concept used to analyse and evaluate how journalists and editors decide which stories they should choose for their Newspaper/bulletin/broadcast etc. Journalists themselves would not refer to ‘cultural proximity' or 'amplitude'. Journalists are more likely to argue they have an innate kind of ‘news sense’. What of course shapes this news sense is reference to how previous stories have been selected and treated. Intertextual references shape the way the encoder encodes and the way the decoder decodes.