Lecture Nine - News Values

"If it BLEEDS, it Leads"

The one phrase that seems to keep appearing each time I sit in Forgan Smith E109 at 2pm on Monday. And this week was no different. Today's lecture was based on 'News Values' which was simply defined as "the degree of promise a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience." News stories are selected on the basis of four main values:

Impact - what intrigues the audience 

Audience Identification -what is of interest to the audience 

Pragmatics - ethics and current affairs 

Source Influence - public relations 

These four categories are what separates the handful of news stories from the rest of the happenings of the world. The inverted pyramid best explains the broadly agreed upon set of values of news journalism known as Newsworthiness. As mentioned before in Lecture Three, the inverted pyramid has the most important facts at the top and bleeds down to the least important facts.

This then leads back to the beginning of this post. It is said that media outlets go by the theory of "If it BLEEDS, it Leads," (basically anything damaging or disastrous) where as other go by "If it's LOCAL it Leads." But there has to be factors that determine this, right? Particular institutions shape their own news values on and around the twelve factors of Newsworthiness. Those being:

- Negativity

- Proximity

- Recency

- Currency 

- Continuity 

- Uniqueness

- Simplicity

- Personality 

- Predictably

- Elite Nations or People

- Exclusivity

- Size

There are also three hypothesis of Newsworthiness:

- The additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event satisfies, the higher the probability that it becomes news.

- The complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other. 

- The exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will usually not become news.

We then went through other journalists opinions on the values of Newsworthiness which were interesting however most were very similar to the original twelve presented. We were the shown the threats to Newsworthiness which were put simply as:

- Journalism / Commercialisation of media and social life.

- Journalism / Public Relations. 

- Journalism’s ideals / Journalism’s reality

The sad truth is the journalism is becoming lazy, incompetent and in my opinion potentially unreliable due to these three threats. We were given a quote by McKinnon (which I found really stood out) in which he stated  "All of which leads to an unfortunate trend … in which pressures of the newsroom(or according to some, laziness or inadequately trained journalists) result in everyday reuse of press releases without re-writing, checking or analysis." Which basically sums it up.

We then concluded with media outlets providing the audience with what the audience need and desire because after all the media depends on its' viewers.