Value and Worth in the News: All the News that’s Fit to Print (week 9)

This week we focused on News Values; a concept defined as the degree of prominence an outlet gives to a particular story. By this definition, the important thing to consider is that the audience’s ‘attention’ is essentially dictated by the degree of prominence given by the outlet.

However, before news values can be discussed, we need to know exactly what news is. The word itself derives from a plural of ‘new’ – first attested in the late 14^th century to mean “new things.” Still today the word retains this meaning, at least from the perspective of news outlets; Arthur Evelyn Waugh described news as “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.”

So if ‘news’ exists as stories of what has happened recently, how do journalists, in a society where the events of the entire world are known, sift through the unimaginably huge amount of events that take place each day to present to an audience? This depends on the socio-cultural context of news outlet, and is decided by the news values that they hold.

According to Dr Redman, four factors influence an outlet’s News Values: impact, audience identification, pragmatics and source influence.

Impact refers to the media’s (and thus the journalist’s) dual role: to inform and to entertain; news shocks and generates interest, whether it be through obscurity, disgust or appreciation. Audience identification is imperative; in the calamity of the day’s events world-wide, an audience places value on what is been happening in their immediate geographical, cultural or social context, as these stories are more likely to affect their lives directly. Pragmatics refers to the practical side of telling news; the news that is both ethical and easy to report. Source influence plays a major role due to the paradoxical roles of journalism and public relations. “Journalism loves to hate PR, whether for spinning, controlling access, approving copy, or protecting clients at the expense of the truth” says UK PR executive Julia Hobsbawm, “yet journalism has never needed public relations more, and PR has never done a better job for the media.”

Newsworthiness

The news values of an outlet inform what is known as ‘newsworthiness’ – the value placed on different types of news stories. Newsworthiness is illustrated in the inverted pyramid structure, where information is presented in decreasing order of worth. Because news values inform newsworthiness, the factors of Impact and Audience Identification are demonstrated. This is how we get terms like “if it bleeds it leads” and “if it’s local it leads.” The role of an editor is to have a deep understanding of their respective institution’s news values, and to identify newsworthiness by acting as “human sieves of the torrent of news” (Harold Evans - The Sunday Times editor, 1967-1981). This role can only be adopted through experience in the newsroom – what Evans eloquently refers to as the “college of osmosis.”

Both editors and journalists rely on experience and instinct rather than logic when defining news values, and because of this role newsworthiness exists in an entirely informal manner. Never written down, news values are passed on socially and verbally through the generations of journalists that pass through the newsroom, espoused by the editors as if they are elders passing on some ancient story.

While different news outlets are all different in their own way, there are some inherent factors that influence a sense of newsworthiness. A number of core factor lists have been compiled, each different in length depending on how much depth is being considered. The most famous of these is undoubtedly Galtung & Ruge’s (1965) twelve factors:

•        Negativity                                         
• ·         Proximity (closeness to home)
• ·         Recency
• ·         Currency
• ·         Continuity
• ·         Uniqueness
• ·         Simplicity
• ·         Personality (i.e celebrity)
• ·         Expectedness (predictability)
• ·         Elite Nations or People
• ·         Exclusivity
•        Size 

From these factors, Galtung & Ruge proposed three rather obvious theories (the hypotheses of additively, complementarity and exclusion), which basically explain that more of these values equals more newsworthiness. These factors reflect have been re-interpreted, re-written and shortened many times in many lists since 1965, but all of these emphasise the importance of emotion (i.e shock or interest), locality (‘if it’s local, it leads’), practicality (whether is it suitable for TV/radio/online and the length of time that journalists can milk the story) and the tendency to value the stories of certain people or nations over others (i.e we rarely hear of the three thousand African children who die of malaria every day, but quite a lot about shopping-centre shootings on the Gold Coast).   

A dark future for News Values: Churnalism, Parasitic PR and the Mass Media Merge

·        Yes, that’s right folks; it’s time for Grim Future Mondays! Three major threats concerning news values lurk in the future.

Firstly, the commercialisation of journalism is impeding upon news values and therefore the output of many media institutions. Intense commercial competition has led to the need for rapid news cycles, and with it a universal change in news values aimed at being the first to report a story. The result is incomplete and untrustworthy news.

Furthermore, inadequate training and general laziness on behalf of the journalist and editor has led to an epidemic rise in PR power; incompetent journalists are undergoing less analysis of press releases, instead simply reusing and publishing. As such, the journalist’s (possibly imagined ) noble role as the guardian of truth with sworn loyalty to the public is being degraded as irresponsible, untrustworthy and biased news is being permitted publication under a new definition of new values. 

Finally, the media is beginning to merge into a single entity. The key problem with this is that this ‘media cartel’ (I imagine a group of elderly men in suits with eye patches smoking cigars, laughing hysterically) will control almost all the stories that reach the public. The issues associated with an information dictatorship are easy to imagine.

Thankfully, salvation may come with the new media. The brilliant Jay Rosen explains to the increasingly commercialised and lazy media cartel that 

“you don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new  balance of power between you and us. The people formerly known as the  audience are simply the public made  realer, less fictional, more able, less  predictable. You should welcome that,  media people. But whether you do or not we want you to know we’re here.” (2005). 

However, even if the truth can be accessed by the public, the threats to news values still exist. Whether or not the vast majority of news corporations retain their credibility depends on how well the news values that they rely upon are upheld.