News values blog task

News values: notes

In 1965, media researchers Galtung & Ruge analysed news stories to find out what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda.

They came up with the following list of news values - a kind of scoring system to work out what might become news. A story which scores highly on each value is likely to be at the top of a TV news bulletin. Some of the news values they suggested include:

Negativity

Bad news - involving death, tragedy, natural disasters or political upheaval - is rated above 'positive' stories (royal weddings etc.)

 
Closeness to home
Audiences relate more to stories that are close to their home, or involve people from their country.

 
Immediacy
How recently did it happen? TV news is very competitive about breaking news – although it is now beaten by social media.

 
Simplicity

Simple stories are preferred by TV news.  Palestine is complicated, a plane crash is easy to follow.

Uniqueness
‘Dog bites man’ is not news. ‘Man bites dog’ is. Unusual stories make it into the news – especially if there is good video to go with it.

Elite nations or people
Stories that focus on important countries or people are likely to make the news. Obama and USA = news, Outer Mongolia not so much...

24 hour TV news

There are some critical differences between a regular news bulletin and 24 hour news:

• A bulletin contains carefully constructed ‘news packages’ and fully scripted presentation
• 24 hour TV news is perfect for live, breaking news as it happens
• 24 hour TV news is more dependent on dramatic pictures or video that will grab the audience and keep them watching

News values blog task

For each of the six news values we have learned, find a clip on YouTube from Sky News (24 hour news) and explain how it fits that news value. The Sky News YouTube channel is here.

Example:

Negativity

 
The Germanwings plane crash fits many of the news values but particularly negativity. Any major transport disaster that kills a large number of people is likely to become a huge news story. This is because it contains death, tragedy, dramatic images and also creates questions for the audience in terms of what went wrong and why the plane crashed.