Newspapers: News Values

Galtung and Ruge defined a set of news values to explain how journalists and editors decide that certain stories and photographs were accepted as newsworthy, while others were not. 

The following list is adapted from their work:

Immediacy: has it happened recently?
Familiarity: is it culturally close to us in Britain?
Amplitude: is it a big event or one which involves large numbers of people?
Frequency: does the event happen fairly regularly? 
Unambiguity: is it clear and definite?
Predictability: did we expect it to happen?
Surprise: is it a rare or unexpected event?
Continuity: has this story already been defined as news?
Elite nations and people: which country has the event happened in? Does the story concern well-known people?
Personalisation: Is it a personal or human interest story?
Negativity: is it bad news?
Exclusivity: do any other newspapers have this story?
Visual impact: are there amazing pictures accompanying the story?
Balance: the story may be selected to balance other news, such as a human survival story to balance a number of stories concerning death.

Classwork/Homework

Read Media Factsheet 76: News Values and complete the following questions/tasks. 
Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets

1) Come up with a news story from the last 12 months for each of the categories suggested by Harriss, Leiter and Johnson:

• Conflict
• Progress
• Disaster
• Consequence
• Prominence 
• Novelty

2) What example news story does the Factsheet use to illustrate Galtung and Ruge's News Values? Why is it an appropriate example of a news story likely to gain prominent coverage?

3) What is gatekeeping?

4) What are the six ways bias can be created in news?

5) How have online sources such as Twitter, bloggers or Wikileaks changed the way news is selected and published?

6) Complete the task on the last page of the Factsheet regarding Sky News and Twitter:

• What does this reveal about how Sky views Twitter as a news source?
• What does it say about how news is being produced?
• What role does the audience have in this process?
• Why might this be a problem for journalistic standards?

7) In your opinion, how has the digital age changed Galtung and Ruge’s news values? 

8) How would you update them for 2018? Choose TWO of Galtung and Ruge's news values and say how they have been affected by the growth of digital technology.

E.g. Immediacy is more important than ever due to news breaking on Twitter or elsewhere online. However, this in turn changes the approach of other news sources such as newspapers as the news will probably already be broken so different angles might be required. Newspapers now contain more comment or opinion rather than the breaking story.

Complete for homework: due next week (exact day confirmed by your exam teacher).