Monday, 6 November 2017

November 6th 2017: News Values

News Values

  • It is about how news professionals decide on what is newsworthy and how to attract the audience.
  • Newspapers online and social news.
Convergence - refers to the crossing over/coming together of 2 or more techs/platforms

Objectivity - about the balance or showing both sides of the story. Most news professionals believe in this.

Galtung and Ruge (1981) - Argues that news is structured according to unspoken values rather than discovered.

Frequency
  • This value is to do with the time scale of events perceived to be "newsworthy". With 24 rolling news channels, online and social events need to be much more frequent to be favoured in news coverage.
Threshold
  • This is the size of an event that's needed for it to be considered "newsworthy". Commonly occurring events happening to individuals will not usually count (except for local news) unless they involve either a celebrity or an unusually violent or sensational happening.
Proximity
  • This value is to do with how close to home a story is. However proximity clearly has an ideological agenda. Stories from 'the West' are favoured over those from the developing world, regardless of the geographical proximity. This reinforces existing prejudices and "otherness" (Gilroy)
  • The 'other' (Paul Gilroy) - when non-white, especially working class, people are portrayed in the media. They are defined in terms of the ways they differ from the (white) majority, not any individual characteristics. This is usually negative. E.g. Black criminal, Asian terrorist (This refers to faith groups)
Negativity
  • Occasionally, news with a happy ending will be favoured, but usually catastrophe and images of violence are covered over positive stories
Predictability
  • Although a key convention of news is to present events as surprising, actually a lot of these are predictable. E.g. an important vote in parliament.
Continuity and Narrative
  • News involves story-telling just like fiction, and it is convenient for journalists to cover stories which are likely to continue over a period of time, with new events unfolding.
  • Brexit is a good example of a story with great potential for continuity and narrative story-telling.
  • Protagonists, antagonists and other recognisable characters will drive the narrative binary oppositions (Levi-Strauss) will e favoured to help the audience to understand quite complex stories.
Composition
  • Newspapers needs to be balanced out, and if the editor feels that there is a disproportionate type of one news-for example, rather dry political stories-he or she will ask journalists to balance out with a human interest or funny story, to add composition.
Personalisation
  • Events are often personalised to give them a human interest angle. This is particularly useful when reporting rather dry, complex political or business type stories.

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