Defining News Values
The practical constraints of the newsgathering process, the collective norms of the newsroom and manipulation by external pressure groups all affect the news value given to an event by the journalist and the way it is reported. The news value given to the story by the audience, its impact or interest, is determined by the degree of change it contains and the relevance of that change to the physical and social security of the individual or group. Major change, coupled with high relevance, gives the story a correspondingly high news value; little, or slow, change, together with low relevance, indicate low news value.
Some commentators (Harcup & O’Neill,) argue that as many stories are apparently manufactured, Galtung and Ruge’s list of news values should be open to question. The dominance of celebrity and social news, the blurring of the boundary between news and reality shows and other popular culture, and the advent of citizen journalism may suggest that the nature of ‘news’ and news values are evolving and that traditional models of the news process are now only partially relevant.
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Famous quotes containing the words defining, news and/or values:
“The U.S. is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is now approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”
—David Blankenhorn (20th century)
“Word of gloom from the war, one day;
Johnston pressed at the front, they say.
Little Giffen was up and away;
A tear—his first—as he bade good-by,
Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
“I’ll write, if spared!” There was news of the fight;
But none of Giffen.—He did not write.”
—Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822–1874)
“Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)