Lecture 9 – News Values
Hello,
hello, hello. I’ve made it to Lecture 9 of Intro to Journalism! And I actually
remember mentioning today’s topic in one of my (much) earlier blog entries. If
I do recall correctly, Skye Doherty, our guest lecturer for Telling Factual
Stories using Text mentioned the term ‘news values’ and I was a little
confused. I mean, I got the general gist of what it meant, but I didn’t really know what they were or how they
were used in newsrooms.
Today I
learnt that there really isn’t a cement definition of what news values are.
They are many things to many people, and the week’s readings and lecture described
several of these. First of all we were given a list of four (don’t worry
Carmel, I’m not going to post every single list!) that looked a little like
this:
- Impact
- Audience Identification
- Pragmatics
- Source Influence
Looking at this
first list alone I was able to grasp a little better what the whole concept was
about. I think though that it would be a difficult task as an editor to make
decisions on what to cut down and what to leave in, but I’ll return to this
point a little later.
These
values or similar lists of values are what underpin news journalism. When a
potential story comes up it is critically considered as to whether it will be ‘news
worthy’. But will what is newsworthy to me, be the same as what is newsworthy to
you? No, of course not and the same can be said across different news services
and across different countries or cultures. In fact, what is newsworthy to an
Australian middle-class audience could be completely inappropriate or offensive
to an overseas nation. This is what
makes observing news values so intriguing I think.
The above
(source: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/304/210) is just one comparison of what type
of stories feature in publications in different countries. From this it is able
to be extrapolated what type of news values are held in the respective nations.
While Canada and the US are not extremely different to each other, there is still
quite a difference in their news values. For example, English Canadian press focuses more on Human Interest than the US and the US has just under double the amount of war stories then English Canada (percentage wise). You can only imagine how extreme the
differences would be between nations such as China and the US.
The
inverted pyramid was once again discussed today, and it seems that more and more, the
punchy headline and opening sentence is being relied upon. To lure readers in the first place and to urge them to continue reading the story. Sites such as Twitter may be a factor at play in
this. Media consumers want to get straight to the point and know what’s held in
an article in a succinct manner. In summary they want...TO. THE. POINT.
To the side are just two more lists of news
values created by academically minded fellows:
Galtung
and Ruge went one step further in their creation of a list, they made some
hypotheses! The first being the Additivity
hypothesis:
The more news value factors a story
includes, the more popular the story will be.
There
is the Complementarity hypothesis:
Certain factors will tend to exclude each other. So it generally
isn’t possible to have a news story that ticks all the boxes.
Aaaaand,
last but not least the Exclusion hypothesis:
Pretty obvious one considering the
two above, BUT, this one pretty much means that if a story doesn’t fulfil any
of the values it’s probably not going to make great news. Weow.
Craig
Thompson (no, not that Craig
Thompson), an editor at a UK newspaper talks about news values below:
I include this
video because, while watching it I noticed he actually mentioned many of the
values in the lists of news values given in the lecture. Impact, locality,
emotion. It demonstrates that yes, in fact, news value are a high consideration in actual day to day newsrooms. In fact, Craig Thompson, is a ‘human sieve’!
Like the Harold Evan’s quote referred to in the lecture. A lot of this ability
to decide what should or should not go into the day’s would come from
experience but I think in order to have a real knack for it you’d have to have
some degree of natural instinct.
Although
these news values may seem pretty steadfast, I can say that I never really
considered them when I looked at newspaper headlines or what was on the local
news every night. It is due to the fact that average, everyday citizens don’t
critically analyse news that threats to newsworthiness are coming about. Australia
and the world all over are not demanding enough of high quality news and so
what is a result of this? I’ll tell you what a result of this is! …Well
actually Dr Redman told me, but I can tell you as well.
- ‘Churnalism’ and junk news is clogging our media
- Too much lazy journalism
- Influence of public relations are causing tabloidisation
- AND there is a hypercommercialisation of outlets
A big
reason all of those above things are happening is that press releases are just
being cut and pasted, no facts are being checked, and no analysis is being done
by the journalists.
We need to
somehow start returning to the idealised journalistic world of obligation to
truth, independence and fact! If we don’t our news and public knowledge in general
is going to start going downhill stat! And while returning to this world we must
adjust to new aspects of a changing world. One where the audience are no longer
silent bystanders. The can comment or perhaps even write stories themselves on
blogs. There’s a new balance of power and media organisations have to work with
the fact that the ‘audience’ is not less fictional, more able, less predictable
and they’re realer! People may start to define their own news values in blogs and find that the larger public connect with them, over the traditional values. Or some people could hold some extreme values and get a small but loyal following.
Only time
will really tell what the new balance of media power will mean for news values
or whether it will really have an impact at all.
Ciao for
now.
x
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