“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about
anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s
dead.” (Arthur Evelyn Waugh)
News values refer to the degree
of prominence a media outlet gives to a story and the attention that is paid by
an audience. But what makes a story newsworthy and how do they know?
What
makes a story newsworthy?
Over the years there have been a
number of lists compiled, spelling out the importance of certain values in the news.
One value that continues to crop up is negativity or bad news. This is
certainly obvious when you turn the TV on and you are bombarded with stories of
car crashes, murder and natural disasters. If it bleeds, it leads, right? Another
value that occurs frequently on these lists is that of elites and celebrities.
People seem to want to know what their favourite movie star is up to and keep
track of the activities of people in power. Proximity and the notion of if it’s
local, it leads, is another key value.
The big six values which
encompasses most of the defined news values, including the values mentioned
already, are significance, proximity, conflict, human interest, novelty and
prominence.
Essentially, newsworthiness involves
telling the factual stories that people either need or want to know and of
course by extension has the all-important role of selling newspapers and
maintaining high ratings.
How
do they know?
According to Harold Evans, having
a “sense of news values” is the defining quality of an editor, serving as “human
sieves of the torrent of news”. Realising and creating a story that people want
or need to know about is apparently an instinctual thing. There are no formal
codes or rulebook to follow, but rather journalists learn on the spot and ‘go
with their gut’.
Shift
in power
News is no longer one way and
there has been a shift in power to the audience. The audience now has a means
to speak whereas they used to have to passively accept what and when a story
was presented to them. The people have more of a role in dictating news values
and highlight the weighting of certain values in society as they are able to
openly discuss and report on stories on the new platform (the Internet,
Twitter, Facebook, blog and the list goes on). 
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