So how guilty are you? Are you more interested in seeing stories about
a recent murder victim then you are about the vaccine for horses to help in the
prevention of the Hendra virus?
News values, or the ‘newsworthiness’ of a story is determined by the
degree of prominence or attention given to a news story. Today news seems to
revolve around the saying; ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. In summary a news story is
run by how much popularity or interest it will gain from the audience. But what
are the things that make us interested?
Various lists have been written with attempts to categorize what makes
a story ‘newsworthy’. The lists have slowly become more and more precise with a
reduction from 12 factors to 4. So to keep it simple, I believe that the best representation of newsworthiness
is describe by Murray Masterson’s ‘The Big 6 News Values (descending order)’
1. Significance: IMPACT!
2. Proximity: location plus emotional,
historical, cultural & social significance
3. Conflict: war, government, celebrities,
sport, neighbours
4. Human interest: a bunch of
stickybeaks
5. Novelty: ‘the unusual’ ‘Gee-Whizz!’
6. Prominence: high profile, famous
for being famous.
No matter what news story you looks at,
it is quite easy to find the underlying new values associated with the piece. Although
sometimes there can be confusion as to what the underlying news value actually
is.
In this week’s tute our attention was
drawn to the article ‘Russian man flipped into air by car’. If you haven’t seen the footage go
check it out (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8462994/man-flipped-into-air-by-car).
When asked what out group thought the news values was we immediately threw out
values such as uniqueness, shock and even entertainment. We were then informed
that the main value within the story is visual. The fact that we have footage
of the man being flipped is what alerts us to the story.
The main point of this is that news stories
can have more than one news value. It can be related to many different values
but will most likely have a prominent news value that it easily relates to.
Till Next Time…
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