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News Values and Newsworthiness News Values and Newsworthiness Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication News Values and Newsworthiness Helen Caple Subject: Journalism Studies Online Publication Date: Jun 2018 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.850 Summary and Keywords How events become news has always been a fundamental question for both journalism practitioners and scholars. For journalism practitioners, news judgments are wrapped up in the moral obligation to hold the powerful to account and to provide the public with the means to participate in democratic governance. For journalism scholars, news selection and construction are wrapped up in investigations of news values and newsworthiness. Scholarship systematically analyzing the processes behind these judgments and selections emerged in the 1960s, and since then, news values research has made a significant contribution to the journalism literature. Assertions have been made regarding the status of news values, including whether they are culture bound or universal, core or standard. Some hold that news values exist in the minds of journalists or are even metaphorically speaking “part of the furniture,” while others see them as being inherent or infused in the events that happen or as discursively constructed through the verbal and visual resources deployed in news storytelling. Like in many other areas of journalism research, systematic analysis of the role that visuals play in the construction of newsworthiness has been neglected. However, recent additions to the scholarship on visual news values analysis have begun to address this shortfall. The convergence and digitization of news production, rolling deadlines, new media platforms, and increasingly active audiences have also impacted on how news values research is conducted and theorized, making this a vibrant and ever-evolving research paradigm. Keywords: commercial values, discourse analysis, journalism studies, news factors, news photography, news selection, news values, newsworthiness, professional values, rhetorical values, visual analysis News, Stories, and Newsworthiness Throughout the history of journalistic practice, print, broadcast, and now digital news organizations have strived to bring stories to the public. These stories are the news. They are stories about the actions of important people and that hold the powerful to account. They are stories about ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. They are stories about aberrant behavior, or disruptions to the moral order. They tell us of the impact that events and Page 1 of 21 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION (communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018 News Values and Newsworthiness issues have on our everyday lives. They edify and they entertain. In sum, they are stories that are important for people to know in order to participate in democratic governance and to function effectively and knowledgeably in society. The exceptional events that constitute these stories are continually unfolding, and any one of these “newsworthy” events could be reported as news on any given day. The decisions that govern whether a story is first written and then published as news sit at the core of journalistic practice, and the criteria that are deployed in deciding what to write and publish are the news values that this article examines. Thus, one way of defining newsworthiness is “worthy of being published as news,” and the criteria that are commonly used to determine newsworthiness are known as news values (Caple & Bednarek, 2016, p. 436). The newsworthiness of an event, however, is only one among many factors that determine whether the said event will be published as news, and the concept of “news values” has been applied to a wide range of decisions that determine what gets published, when, and how. As Strömbäck, Karlsson, and Hopmann (2012, p. 721) note, “news selection is shaped by several factors on different levels of analysis, some of which have less to do with the news value of potential stories and more with practical, economic or format considerations. Hence, it cannot be assumed news values equals news selection.” This is a vitally important observation that has been obfuscated in much research on news values. Thus, this article not only reviews key contributions to the field of news values research, but it also explores the very conceptualization of news values and how this has impacted on this body of research. Much contemporary research investigating the construction and selection of newsworthy events cites Walter Lippmann (1922 [1965], p. 223) as the first person to suggest attributes or conventions for the selection of news items to be published. Vos and Finneman (2017), however, point to the extensive literature (textbooks, trade publications, newspaper columns, and essays) of the 1870s to 1930s that also sought to rationalize newsworthiness and news selection beyond being a faculty that journalists were simply born with (p. 270). According to Vos and Finneman (2017, p. 267), the articulation of newsworthiness and news selection is tied to the professionalization of journalism and the gaining of independence from political and commercial influences during the late 19th century. They suggest that from the 1870s onward, journalists began questioning the basis of their news judgments, finding that “[c]hoosing news was a moral task, requiring sound, professional judgment, and an exclusive, legitimate right of professional journalists” (p. 270). Dating even further back, Westerståhl and Johansson (1994, p. 72) observe commentary on news values by German author Kaspar Stieler, published in 1695. Stieler notes the importance and proximity of events as selection criteria for news, alongside interest in negative events like war and crime. Despite this extensive history, academic research of newsworthiness did not really take off until the 1960s, when Galtung and Ruge (1965) published their seminal work on the structure of foreign news. Indeed, most of the research since the 1960s has used Galtung and Ruge (1965) as the starting point, and their list of news factors has become the dominant conceptualization of news values in journalism and communications studies (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2007, p. 31).1 Since Galtung and Ruge’s news factors have informed so much of the subsequent research on news values, in what follows, their contribution to the field will be examined and critiqued first, before reviewing other research. Overall, the research reviewed in this article is necessarily Western-centric, since Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia have stood at the forefront of this research. Page 2 of 21 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION (communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018 News Values and Newsworthiness Historical Overview of Key Research on News Values Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) work has been held up as the “foundation study of news values” (Bell, 1991, p. 155), the earliest attempt to provide a systematic definition of newsworthiness (Palmer, 1998, p. 378), an innovative study (Allan, 1999, p. 63), and as promising to become “a classic social science answer to the question ‘what is news?’” (Tunstall, 1970, p. 20). The approach to news values posited by Galtung and Ruge is firmly centered on how events become news. Their list of “news factors” comprises a set of selections based on “common-sense perception psychology” (p. 66), created through analogy to radio wave signals. They suggest that 12 factors are at play any time an event is considered worthy of reporting as “news.” These include Frequency, Threshold (absolute intensity, intensity increase), Unambiguity, Meaningfulness (cultural proximity, relevance), Consonance (predictability, demand), Unexpectedness (unpredictability, scarcity), Continuity, Composition. These first eight factors are to be read as “culture-free,” solely based on perception, whereas the remaining four factors are culture bound. These are Reference to elite nations, Reference to elite people, Reference to persons (Personification), Reference to something negative (Negativity). In discussing these news factors, Galtung and Ruge (1965, p. 65) propose a “chain of news communication” that involves processes of selection, distortion, and replication. They hypothesize that the more an event satisfies the criteria/news factors, the more likely that it will be registered as news (selection); once selected, what makes the event newsworthy according to the factors will be accentuated (distortion); and finally, that selection and distortion will be repeated at all steps in the chain from event to reader (replication). This means that the “cumulative effects of the factors should be considerable and produce an image of the world different from ‘what really happened’” (Galtung & Ruge, 1965, p. 71). This idea suggests that the image of the world in the news is one that has been selected, distorted, and replicated through discursive construction and by many different voices; however, rather than focus on this discursive potential, Galtung and Ruge direct their focus
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