If it bleeds, it leads!

News values can be defined as general guidelines or criteria used by media outlets, such as newspapers or broadcast media, to determine how much prominence to give to a story. A good example of this is September 11. All over the newspapers, news shows and internet forums, everyone was reporting on the tragedy that had occurred and what was going to happen afterwards. This is because a lot of people were affected by this and many more were still in danger.

1. Impact

• Threshold: The bigger impact the story has, the more people it affects, the more extreme the effect or the more money or resources it involves, the better its chances of hitting the newsstands.
• Frequency: Events, such as motorway pile-ups, murders and plane crashes, which occur suddenly and fit well with the newspaper or news broadcast's schedule are more readily reported than those which occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night. Long-term trends are unlikely to receive much coverage.
• Negativity: Bad news is more exciting than good news.
• Unexpectedness: If an event is out of the ordinary it will be more likely to make it into the news than an everyday occurrence would.

2. Audience Identification

• Personalisation: People are interested in people. News stories that centre on a particular person, and are presented from a human interest angle, are likely to make the front page, particularly if they involve a well-known person.
• Meaningfulness: This relates to cultural proximity and the extent to which the audience identifies with the topic.
• Reference to elite nations: Stories concerned with global powers receive more attention than those dealing with less influential nations.
• Reference to elite persons: The media pay attention to the rich, powerful, famous and infamous.

3. Pragmatics

• Consonance: Stories which match the media's expectations receive more coverage than those which contradict them. 
• Continuity: A story which is already in the news gathers a kind of momentum – the running story.
• Composition: Stories must compete with one another for space in the media.

4. Source Influence

All of these other news values are valid points, and all can be applied to news today. Like Galtung and Ruge suggest, the more news values a story fits – the better. However, as journalists we do not own the audience so we cannot actually solely decide what is relevant news for our audience. We must be careful to be a mere channel from which information can flow through to our audience. We must not let our own (personal or commercial) bias influence this.

In order to ensure that we as journalists remain relevant we need to maintain high standards of journalism. Our news values need to remain high. Our accountability, reliability, fact checking, in-depth research and accuracy need to be constantly vigilant, otherwise we risk destroying our own media world and careers.  We must avoid bias at all costs. Otherwise the journalist in todays’ world of new media may not survive.

References

Spencer-Thomas, O. (2013). News values. Retrieved from http://www.owenspencer-thomas.com/journalism/newsvalues