News values are actually the "newsworthiness" of a story. The importance that a media outlet gives to a story and how much attention the audience will give to said story. I feel like I should have thought of this element of journalism before. It is one of those things where, after you learn about it, you go "ohhhhhh, but I knew that already!".
Because there is a MASS of news out there everyday, every second, all the time. And it is so logical that there must be some way to prioritize what to publish and what to omit. It reminds me of the Page One documentary we watched in the tutorial today; where someone said (forgive me for paraphrasing, I cannot remember all the words) that Journalists take the avalanche of news and information and shape it into the next morning's newspaper. And another great quote was used in the lecture about how "A sense of news
values” is the first quality of editors – they are the “human sieves of the torrent of news”, even more important even than an ability to write or a command of language." (Harold Evans) And it is true, journalists need to take all this new information and decide what goes to the public. It is quite a responsibility, actually.
And to get to the actual news values; they are what drives every story. Something has to be in that story to make the busy modern person stop and read. And these values have been defined by several people, but obviously there is nothing set in stone. Nothing in journalism is set in stone.
In 1965 Galtung and Ruge defined the news values as being 12 big factors (and I may have stolen this off the lecture slides):
As the years passed many other people revised these news values, always keeping with the same idea, but explaining them in another way. Golding and Elliot created another list of news values in 1979:
Drama
Visual attractiveness
Entertainment
Importance
Size
Proximity
Negativity
Brevity
Recency (exclusives, scoops)
Elites
Personalities
And I could go on and on listing more news values. But you get the idea.
This actually explains a lot about my news digesting habits, as well as everyone else's. Just think of how you read a newspaper? Where you click on a news website? For me, I always head towards the world news, music news or huge happenings in the world. I really could not care less about the NRL or cricket or State of Origin (which people are VERY LOUDLY watching right now, as a matter of fact- something just happened, everyone is shouting...). Because even though there are universal news values, we each have our own set of values that determine what we think is important. And this kind of makes me forgive journalists a little, because I was upset that I read nothing about Zimbabwe or other places I care about. But all along they were just following news values.
Bruce mentioned another modern phenomenon in modern journalism: churnalism.
This refers to the lazy, irresponsible, fast and shallow journalism that happens as a result of the growing need of having new news, now! Where journalism just recycles press releases to fill in the gaps. And this is the problem with journalism, the demand is to great, and the speed at which it needs to be produced is too great. And I honestly cannot think of a solution to this. We can only hope that journalist stay true to in their integrity. Hey! That actually brings me back to what I wrongly thought news values were- the ethical and moral handling of news. Maybe news values should have TWO meanings.
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