News Values and Newsworthiness
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication
News Values and Newsworthiness
Helen Caple
Subject: Journalism Studies Online Publication Date: Jun 2018
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.850
Summary and Keywords
How events become news has always been a fundamental question for both journalism
practitioners and scholars. For journalism practitioners, news judgments are wrapped up in the
moral obligation to hold the powerful to account and to provide the public with the means to
participate in democratic governance. For journalism scholars, news selection and construction
are wrapped up in investigations of news values and newsworthiness. Scholarship systematically
analyzing the processes behind these judgments and selections emerged in the 1960s, and since
then, news values research has made a significant contribution to the journalism literature.
Assertions have been made regarding the status of news values, including whether they are
culture bound or universal, core or standard. Some hold that news values exist in the minds of
journalists or are even metaphorically speaking “part of the furniture,” while others see them as
being inherent or infused in the events that happen or as discursively constructed through the
verbal and visual resources deployed in news storytelling. Like in many other areas of journalism
research, systematic analysis of the role that visuals play in the construction of newsworthiness
has been neglected. However, recent additions to the scholarship on visual news values analysis
have begun to address this shortfall. The convergence and digitization of news production,
rolling deadlines, new media platforms, and increasingly active audiences have also impacted on
how news values research is conducted and theorized, making this a vibrant and ever-evolving
research paradigm.
Keywords: commercial values, discourse analysis, journalism studies, news factors, news photography, news
selection, news values, newsworthiness, professional values, rhetorical values, visual analysis
News, Stories, and Newsworthiness
Throughout the history of journalistic practice, print, broadcast, and now digital news
organizations have strived to bring stories to the public. These stories are the news. They are
stories about the actions of important people and that hold the powerful to account. They are
stories about ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. They are stories about
aberrant behavior, or disruptions to the moral order. They tell us of the impact that events and
Page 1 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
issues have on our everyday lives. They edify and they entertain. In sum, they are stories that
are important for people to know in order to participate in democratic governance and to
function effectively and knowledgeably in society.
The exceptional events that constitute these stories are continually unfolding, and any one of
these “newsworthy” events could be reported as news on any given day. The decisions that
govern whether a story is first written and then published as news sit at the core of journalistic
practice, and the criteria that are deployed in deciding what to write and publish are the news
values that this article examines. Thus, one way of defining newsworthiness is “worthy of being
published as news,” and the criteria that are commonly used to determine newsworthiness are
known as news values (Caple & Bednarek, 2016, p. 436). The newsworthiness of an event,
however, is only one among many factors that determine whether the said event will be
published as news, and the concept of “news values” has been applied to a wide range of
decisions that determine what gets published, when, and how. As Strömbäck, Karlsson, and
Hopmann (2012, p. 721) note, “news selection is shaped by several factors on different levels of
analysis, some of which have less to do with the news value of potential stories and more with
practical, economic or format considerations. Hence, it cannot be assumed news values equals
news selection.” This is a vitally important observation that has been obfuscated in much
research on news values. Thus, this article not only reviews key contributions to the field of
news values research, but it also explores the very conceptualization of news values and how
this has impacted on this body of research.
Much contemporary research investigating the construction and selection of newsworthy events
cites Walter Lippmann (1922 [1965], p. 223) as the first person to suggest attributes or
conventions for the selection of news items to be published. Vos and Finneman (2017), however,
point to the extensive literature (textbooks, trade publications, newspaper columns, and essays)
of the 1870s to 1930s that also sought to rationalize newsworthiness and news selection beyond
being a faculty that journalists were simply born with (p. 270). According to Vos and Finneman
(2017, p. 267), the articulation of newsworthiness and news selection is tied to the
professionalization of journalism and the gaining of independence from political and commercial
influences during the late 19th century. They suggest that from the 1870s onward, journalists
began questioning the basis of their news judgments, finding that “[c]hoosing news was a moral
task, requiring sound, professional judgment, and an exclusive, legitimate right of professional
journalists” (p. 270). Dating even further back, Westerståhl and Johansson (1994, p. 72) observe
commentary on news values by German author Kaspar Stieler, published in 1695. Stieler notes
the importance and proximity of events as selection criteria for news, alongside interest in
negative events like war and crime.
Despite this extensive history, academic research of newsworthiness did not really take off until
the 1960s, when Galtung and Ruge (1965) published their seminal work on the structure of
foreign news. Indeed, most of the research since the 1960s has used Galtung and Ruge (1965) as
the starting point, and their list of news factors has become the dominant conceptualization of
news values in journalism and communications studies (Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2007, p. 31).1
Since Galtung and Ruge’s news factors have informed so much of the subsequent research on
news values, in what follows, their contribution to the field will be examined and critiqued first,
before reviewing other research. Overall, the research reviewed in this article is necessarily
Western-centric, since Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia have stood
at the forefront of this research.
Page 2 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Historical Overview of Key Research on News Values
Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) work has been held up as the “foundation study of news
values” (Bell, 1991, p. 155), the earliest attempt to provide a systematic definition of
newsworthiness (Palmer, 1998, p. 378), an innovative study (Allan, 1999, p. 63), and as
promising to become “a classic social science answer to the question ‘what is news?’” (Tunstall,
1970, p. 20).
The approach to news values posited by Galtung and Ruge is firmly centered on how events
become news. Their list of “news factors” comprises a set of selections based on “common-sense
perception psychology” (p. 66), created through analogy to radio wave signals. They suggest
that 12 factors are at play any time an event is considered worthy of reporting as “news.” These
include Frequency, Threshold (absolute intensity, intensity increase), Unambiguity,
Meaningfulness (cultural proximity, relevance), Consonance (predictability, demand),
Unexpectedness (unpredictability, scarcity), Continuity, Composition. These first eight factors
are to be read as “culture-free,” solely based on perception, whereas the remaining four factors
are culture bound. These are Reference to elite nations, Reference to elite people, Reference to
persons (Personification), Reference to something negative (Negativity).
In discussing these news factors, Galtung and Ruge (1965, p. 65) propose a “chain of news
communication” that involves processes of selection, distortion, and replication. They
hypothesize that the more an event satisfies the criteria/news factors, the more likely that it will
be registered as news (selection); once selected, what makes the event newsworthy according to
the factors will be accentuated (distortion); and finally, that selection and distortion will be
repeated at all steps in the chain from event to reader (replication). This means that the
“cumulative effects of the factors should be considerable and produce an image of the world
different from ‘what really happened’” (Galtung & Ruge, 1965, p. 71). This idea suggests that
the image of the world in the news is one that has been selected, distorted, and replicated
through discursive construction and by many different voices; however, rather than focus on this
discursive potential, Galtung and Ruge direct their focus onto how to relate the news factors to
each other in quantifying the newsworthiness of the event per se. Thus, they present two further
hypotheses: the first being the Additivity Hypothesis that “The higher the total score of an event,
the higher the probability that it will become news, and even make headlines” (Galtung & Ruge,
1965, p. 71). They do not test this hypothesis since, as they claim, it is “almost too simple to
mention” (p. 71). The second is the Complementarity Hypothesis, wherein an event low on one
dimension or news factor will have to be high on another “complementary” dimension to make it
into the news.
To test their assumptions, Galtung and Ruge carry out content analysis on press cuttings in the
form of “news story, editorial, article (reportage, interview) or letter to the editor” (p. 74). This
analysis of the text involved the coding of a unit (press clipping) according to the presence or
absence of various items. These included the presence or absence of elites (nations and people)
and whether the “mode” was “negative,” “positive,” or “neutral” (p. 74). The focus of the coding
was on things and contexts, that is, what was reported on and where? For example, they coded
each cutting for “whether it reports something ‘negative’ (something is destroyed, disrupted,
torn down) or something ‘positive’ (something is built up, constructed, put together)” and for
people “whether they are seen in a context that is negative or positive” (Galtung & Ruge, 1965,
Page 3 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
p. 77). From their analysis, Galtung and Ruge tentatively concluded that “There is probably such
a phenomenon as complementarity of news factors” (1965, p. 80, italics in original), although
they felt that more research was needed.
Given that most of the research since the 1960s has used Galtung and Ruge as the starting
point, it is worth making a few initial observations in relation to this classic research at this
point (more specific criticisms of this research are introduced in discussion of relevant studies
below). Galtung and Ruge squarely focus on events, as they seem to suggest that an event
“either possesses them [news factors] or does not possess them” (Galtung & Ruge, 1965, p. 71).
Thus, it appears that the events themselves are somehow invested with newsworthiness or that
news factors are inherent in events. Galtung and Ruge have in fact been criticized for focusing
on events as if they were endowed with epistemological qualities that infuse them with
newsworthiness (e.g., Harcup & O’Neill, 2001, p. 265).
From their discussion of the data, however, it is clear that the analysis concerns not just the
press clipping itself (where events are discursively constructed) but also depends on a range of
other external factors (e.g., what is on the news agenda, the political leanings of the newspaper,
radical vs. conservative). For instance, the news factor “threshold” relates to the scope or scale
of an event, whereas the news factor “composition” relates to the mix of different types of news
stories in a news publication (a newspaper, a bulletin), and the news factor “continuity” relates
to the news agenda. Thus, one would assume that analysis of the press cuttings alone was not
enough to be able to assess whether certain news factors were satisfied. This raises the question
of whether content analysis of published stories is sufficiently able to detect whether all of these
news factors are in play or not and whether other methods (e.g., ethnography) might be more
suitable in assessing news factors that focus on other stages in the process of producing news
(e.g., observation of editorial meetings where the fit of a story with the current news agenda
would be discussed). This brings Strömbäck et al.’s (2012, p. 721) claims regarding news
selection (noted above) into focus, which will be further addressed in the next section. Further
criticism leveled at Galtung and Ruge includes the fact that they ignored the visual aspect of
news reporting (Tunstall, 1971), a point that will be taken up in the section “News Values and
Images.” For now, attention turns to other research on news values that succeeded this
foundational study.
Another Norwegian researcher publishing at the same time as Galtung and Ruge, in fact in the
same volume of the Journal of Peace Research (1965, 2 [1]), is Einar Østgaard.2 He suggested a
connection between news factors and political and socioeconomic conditions, by positing that
the “free flow of news” is influenced by conditions that apply both within the news production
process and by factors external to it. These include political and economic factors, such as news
sources, cost of production, editorial policy, and market orientation (p. 44), and which have a
hampering effect (p. 45) on the flow of news. Internal factors, which are explained by Østgaard
(1965, pp. 45–51) as necessary in making the news “newsworthy,” “interesting,” or “palatable”
to the public, are Simplification, Identification, Sensationalism, and The News Barrier. Presented
as discussion points only, Østgaard does not provide for the systematic analysis of the factors he
suggests influence news flow.
Most research following on from these studies either used or added to Galtung and Ruge’s
original list or proposed entirely new sets of news values. Golding and Elliott (1979, p. 114)
described news values variously as “criteria of selection,” “guidelines for the presentation of
items,” and “qualities of events or of their journalistic construction” that determine inclusion of
an item in a bulletin by their “absence or presence.” They rename a number of Galtung and
Page 4 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Ruge’s news factors, as well as add Importance, Entertainment, and Recency into the mix of
news values. Since their research focused on broadcast news, they also suggest Visual
Attractiveness as a news value, claiming that the mere availability of film or the “dramatic
qualities of the film” (p. 116) are likely to increase the chances of a story being included. Given
the technological and logistical limitations of film capture in the 1970s, such a claim for the
mere availability of film constituting a news value is understandable. However, in the imagesaturated 21st century where image availability is no longer an issue in almost all news
contexts, different arguments need to be made in relation to the newsworthiness of visuals (see
Caple, 2013; Caple & Bednarek, 2016).
German researchers (e.g., Eilders, 1997; Schulz, 1982; Staab, 1990) investigating news factors
also drew on Galtung and Ruge (1965) as their “theoretical and methodological
backbone” (Eilders, 2006, p. 6). Schulz (1982) was interested in the relationship between the
structure of news and people’s awareness of events. Thus, while he regarded news factors as
“those features of an event that determine its newsworthiness” (1982, p. 145), he was more
interested in their cognitive dimensions (see also Eilders, 2006, for a cognitive approach).
Examining the correlation between political reporting on television in a southwestern German
town and the “image of politics” held by viewers, Schulz concluded that “news factors” may be
conceptualized as “organizational criteria of collective perception which govern the media’s as
well as the individual’s construction of reality” (Schulz, 1982, p. 149). He proposed six
dimensions of news selection that are measured by frequency, position, length, and presentation
(p. 146).3 These six dimensions are Status, Valence, Relevance, Identification, Consonance, and
Dynamics, which overlap to a large degree with the news factors suggested by Østgaard and
Galtung and Ruge (demonstrated in the tabulated summaries of news values in Caple &
Bednarek, 2013).
Another German researcher, Staab (1990), saw the value in distinguishing more clearly between
events and stories. Rather than approaching news factors as “qualities” inherent in an event,
Staab suggested that journalists may “ascribe news factors to a news story” (p. 429). He
explained that in writing news stories, the journalist can “stress aspects of the actual event and
therefore stress different news factors and, as a consequence give a different meaning and
emphasis to the event and the corresponding news story” (1990, p. 429). In testing his
functional model, he advises a multi-method approach including content analysis, surveys among
journalists, and observation of journalistic practice in the newsroom.
Examining the North American news media context, Shoemaker, Danielian, and Brendlinger
(1991) use dimensions such as deviance and social/political/cultural significance to measure the
newsworthiness of an event (see also Chang, Shoemaker, & Brendlinger, 1987, for earlier work
in this area). They take the “event” as their unit of analysis and test hypotheses such as “the
more deviant a world event is, the more prominently it will be covered by U.S. media” (p. 786),
using a four-point scale to measure deviance. More recent studies investigating news values in
sporting events (see Lee & Choi, 2009) have also applied this method of assessing
newsworthiness. Taking a radically different conceptualization of news values, also in the North
American context, is the work of Fuller (1996). He focuses on standards and guidelines by which
journalists work, and his set of news values include Objectivity, Accuracy, Fairness, Neutrality,
Intellectual Honesty, and Degrees of Proof.
Page 5 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Another prominent news values scholar who sits somewhat on the periphery of journalism
studies is New Zealand sociolinguist Allan Bell. His work on news values is included here since
he is widely cited and applied by both linguistics and journalism scholars, and his categorization
of news values is useful in identifying key issues in news values research, as discussed in the
final section. Bell’s (1991) approach to news values draws on his professional background as a
journalist in describing news values as “the—often unconscious—criteria by which newsworkers
make their professional judgements as they process stories” (Bell, 1991, p. 155). Building on but
also modifying Galtung and Ruge, Bell categorizes news values into three groups. The first
group relates to news content (values in news actors and events) and includes values such as
Recency, Unexpectedness, and Superlativeness. The second group concerns news gathering and
processing (values in the news process) and includes values such as Continuity, Competition,
and Prefabrication. The third group concerns three values (in the news text) that have to do with
“the quality or style of the news text” (p. 160)—Clarity, Brevity, and Color—which Bell also talks
about as “goals” or “aims” of news writing and editing (Bell, 1991, p. 160, 1995, p. 306, 319).
For detailed critique of Bell’s (1991) approach, see Caple and Bednarek (2013) and Bednarek
and Caple (2017).
The literature discussed up to this point largely ignores the visual news storytelling that also
occurred during this period and the fact that photography also contributes to the
newsworthiness of an event. In fact, only a few researchers have considered news values,
photography, and other visuals, as summarized in the next section.
News Values and Images
Photographs have been an integral part of news storytelling since their inception. However, the
body of research investigating press photography does not appear to match this longevity (see
Caple, 2013) and is severely lacking with respect to the relationship between news values and
images. This has been noted by only a few researchers (e.g., Rössler, Bomhoff, Haschke,
Kersten, & Müller, 2011) and Tunstall (1971, p. 21) is the only researcher to criticize Galtung
and Ruge for ignoring the visual aspect of news presentation altogether.
An early semiotic approach is evident in Hall’s (1973) writing on press photography. For him,
there are two levels of signification of news. In relation to images, this involves the formal news
value of the photographic sign—that is, the elaboration of the photograph and text in terms of
the professional ideology of news (Hall, 1973, p. 179). Formal news values as expressed in the
press photograph include the unexpected, dramatic, recent event concerning a person of high
status. The second level of signification is the ideological level of connoted themes and
interpretations and thus resonates with Barthes’s (1977) conceptualization of denotation and
connotation.
Some researchers apply “traditional” news values to press photography, as in Singletary and
Lamb’s (1984) analysis of award-winning press photography in the United States, which found
that the photos “typically focused on a narrow range of those values.” These were Timeliness,
Proximity, and Conflict in the case of news photos, and Proximity and Human Interest in feature
photos (p. 108). Only a few researchers have attempted to compile a list of news values that
specifically relate to press photography. Craig’s (1994) study of the use of images in two
Australian publications detects five news values at work in press photographs: Reference to Elite
Page 6 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Persons, Composition, Personalization, Negativity, and Conflict/Dramatization. More recently,
researchers have proposed a set of “image-inherent news factors” (Rössler et al., 2011, p. 417).
Their catalogue of photo news factors includes Damage, Violence/Aggression, Controversy,
Celebrities, Unexpectedness, Emotions, Execution and Technique, and Sexuality/Eroticism.
These photo news factors are defined as “selection criteria” and are said to determine whether
the images are “worth publishing” (p. 417).
Taking a discursive approach to news values analysis and news photography, Caple (2013),
Caple and Bednarek (2016), and Bednarek and Caple (2017) suggest that newsworthiness is
constructed in images through a range of visual devices. To give just one example, the news
value Negativity may be constructed in the content of a photograph through the depiction of
negative events and their effects (e.g., the aftermath of accidents, natural disasters, the injured/
wounded, the wreckage/damage done to property); or by including people experiencing negative
emotions; or by showing people engaging in norm-breaking behavior, for example, fighting,
vandalizing (Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 269). Negativity can also be reinforced through image
capture, for example, in the movement/blurring of (moving) images where the camera operator
may be running or moving erratically because of the dangerous situation they may be in.4 Image
quality in terms of noise/graininess or lack of focus/depth of field may further heighten or
dramatize negative content and thus reinforce the construction of news values in the image
content. Other news values constructed in images include Aesthetic Appeal, Consonance,
Eliteness, Impact, Positivity, and Proximity (Bednarek & Caple, 2017, pp. 53–67).
Other researchers have been less specific in their assessment of news values and press
photography, with the concept of visualization and the availability of images still being listed as
selection criteria (see Rössler et al., 2011, p. 417). For instance, Harcup and O’Neill (2001)
comment that “if a story provided a good picture opportunity then it was often included even
when there was little obvious intrinsic newsworthiness” (p. 274). In their updated list of news
values, Harcup and O’Neill (2016, p. 13) offer Audiovisuals as a news value, where “[s]tories
that have arresting photographs” are a requirement for selection. What constitutes an “arresting
photograph,” however, remains underdetermined.
In relation to other types of visuals, Dick (2014, p. 503) finds that a combination of “conventional
journalistic values” (e.g., accuracy, fairness, objectivity) and “organisational values” drive the
selection of newsworthy data for presentation as infographics in the news media. Ahva and
Pantti (2014) examine the use of amateur visuals by the news media and relate this specifically
to the concept of proximity. Through interviews with journalism professionals and audience
members, interpretations of proximity revolve around its spatiotemporal, emotional, and
strategic function (p. 331), moving this concept significantly beyond its traditional
conceptualization as a news value. In a study regarding television news, Pantti (2010) argues for
the newsworthiness of emotional display. While not strictly labeling emotion as news value per
se, Pantti (2010, p. 174) explores the function of emotion within a news story in terms of its
relevance and meaningfulness in facilitating understanding of a story.
While the literature examining the newsworthiness of images remains somewhat limited, there
are numerous attempts at updating news values in relation to other aspects of contemporary
news storytelling, particularly in relation to shifts in the digital ecology of journalism as a social
practice.
Page 7 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
News Values in the Digital Age
Notwithstanding the massive transformation that has taken place in the news media arena in
recent decades, few have questioned whether news values have also transformed over this time.
Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2007, p. 31) lament the failing of the media and communications
discipline to “think outside of [Galtung & Ruge’s] framework or to comprehensively challenge
it.” Their own challenge centers on the news factor of “frequency” in relation to time in
television. They argue for the “mediatisation of time” (p. 34) through the massive
transformations that have occurred in live and continuous television news coverage. For them,
television news modulates between the compression and decompression of time, speeding up
and slowing down the pace of events through its technological connectivity and its different
modes of representation (p. 34). The pervasive culture across broadcast media today, they
argue, is one of “liveness,” which accounts for the nature and impact of television news.
Other researchers have focused on whether it is possible to talk about global or core news
values that apply throughout the world. Conley and Lamble (2006), for example, differentiate
between core and standard news values, taking the notion of core values from Masterton (e.g.,
2005), who, in the 1980s, conducted interviews with senior journalists and journalism educators
in 63 countries. Masterton was interested in discovering whether there was a difference
between journalism values in the West and in Asia and where there was common ground in their
conceptualizations. His interview results showed that “journalists around the world accept that
there is a three-element core of newsworthiness without which no information can become
news” (Masterton, 2005, p. 42). These three core values are Interest, Timeliness, and Clarity.
Masterton also suggests that there is a further set of internationally recognized criteria that are
valid “regardless of race, nationality, culture, politics or religion” (2005, p. 42). These are
Consequence, Proximity, Conflict, Human Interest, Novelty, and Prominence. Following on from
this, Conley and Lamble (2006) identify eight of their own standard news-value criteria: Impact,
Conflict, Timeliness, Proximity, Prominence, Currency, Human Interest, and The Unusual.
In an attempt to widen the scope of news values to be more inclusive of the 21st century news
landscape, Brighton and Foy (2007, pp. 25–29) propose a set of “new news values.” They see
their updated list as responding to the “cultural shift” in the relation between providers and
consumers of news (p. 6), as being “flexible” (p. 5), and as “more appropriate for this digital age
of converged media forms” (p. 5). Like many other approaches to news values in the journalism
studies discipline, Brighton and Foy align themselves with the idea that news values are
selection criteria (a set of rules) applied to news stories as a means of prioritizing items. They
also view news values as “pure” (p. 3), while the story is “already corrupted” (p. 3) as it has been
through a mediation process. Other corrupting influences include pressure from outside the
industry (e.g., a proprietor, advertiser, politician) and are encapsulated in their new news value
of “External influences” (p. 29). Interestingly, for Brighton and Foy (2007, p. 15), the
introduction of television and in particular the live television news broadcast is both evidence of
the need to update Galtung and Ruge’s list of news factors and an example of one of the purest
forms of unmediated news. To justify this claim, they use the example of the September 11,
2001, attack on the World Trade Center in New York, stating that:
Page 8 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
the reportage, in whatever form it took, was instinctive on the part of the reporters, who
knew that this was an event which needed no time to transform into news—and those
who watched or listened around the globe as events unfolded knew with equal
instinctiveness that there was no need for any mediation; what they were seeing was
pure, unfiltered news.
(Brighton & Foy, 2007, p. 15)
Brighton and Foy’s (2007) list of new news values includes Relevance, Topicality, Composition,
Expectation, Unusualness, Worth, and External Factors. However, there is considerable overlap
between the explanations for their new news values and for those that have come before them
(Caple & Bednarek, 2013, pp. 18–29).
Harcup and O’Neill (2016, p. 1) revisit and update their list of news values (originally published
in Harcup & O’Neill, 2001) and continue to stress that “[n]ews values are worth studying
because they inform the mediated world that is presented to news audiences, providing a shared
shorthand operational understanding of what working journalists are required to produce to
deadlines.” In their new study, news items shared on Facebook and Twitter are included in their
content analysis of published news stories. Doing so, they argue, allows for “preliminary
comparisons of notions of newsworthiness as decided by journalists and audiences,
respectively” (Harcup & O’Neill, 2016, p. 10). Their updated list of news values introduces the
following new news values: Exclusivity, Conflict, Audio Visuals, Shareability, and Drama.5 These
complement the old list that includes Bad News, Surprise, Entertainment, Relevance, Follow-up,
the Power Elite, Celebrity, Good News, Magnitude, and, News Organization’s Agenda (p. 13). For
Harcup and O’Neill (2016), news values continue to operate as selection criteria, as being
“intrinsic” (p. 14) in events, “inherent” (p. 14) in news stories, and they contend that “potential
news stories must generally satisfy one and preferably more of [these] requirements to be
selected.”
Bednarek and Caple (2017, p. 43) offer a complementary approach to news values research by
suggesting a more systematic analysis of how news values are established in discourse. They use
a very focused definition of news values, which excludes moral-ethical and commercial values as
well as news writing objectives and news selection factors such as availability of reporters,
audience analytics, or commercial pressures. News values in this sense concern “the
newsworthiness of events—their potential newsworthiness in a given community, their
newsworthiness as evaluated and determined by newsworkers in news practice, or their
newsworthiness as constructed through discourse” (p. 42). Their approach, discursive news
values analysis (DNVA), focuses on the last aspect and examines how specific events are
constructed as newsworthy in any published news story. Thus, they do not ask why an event is
selected as news, but how it is constructed as news, and the focus is on presentation or
treatment rather than selection. Their DNVA framework deals with news as discourse, as
semiotic practice. As Bednarek (2016, p. 31) states, “examining how events are endowed with
newsworthiness by the news media shows which aspects of the event are emphasized, and
reveals the shape in which events are packaged for news consumption by audiences.” This
means that DNVA can be an additional tool for critical discourse analysis (Bednarek & Caple,
2014), since many researchers have argued that new values are themselves an ideological
system (e.g., Bell, 1991; Cotter, 2010; van Dijk, 1988; Hall, 1973). DNVA can also be used to
examine newsworthiness in news items that are widely shared through social media, thus telling
Page 9 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
researchers whether stories with particular configurations of news values are shared more than
others (see Bednarek & Caple, 2017, ch. 8, for a DNVA of most-shared news items on Facebook).
Crucially, DNVA provides a unified framework for examining how events are both linguistically
and visually constructed as news.6 For Bednarek and Caple (2017, p. 71), both visual and verbal
semiotic resources play an important role in constituting and reinforcing news values. They
contend that their DNVA framework allows researchers to identify when and where in a story
specific news values are emphasized, and when they are absent. DNVA can also provide insights
into the packaging of news—how news values are integrated and structured in the form of
consumable news products and the role that different components (headlines, visuals, frames,
layout, etc.) play. Semiotic resources construe the reported event as newsworthy, both to attract
a particular target audience and to justify to that audience how this event constitutes news. In
analyzing news as semiotic practice in this way, one can see how skillfully the “discourse of news
values” is used by newsworkers to “sell” events to their audiences as news through verbal and
visual resources.7
By way of concluding this section, a number of observations can be made: First, it is clear that
there has been a proliferation of lists of news values, many of which overlap with each other in
terms of the aspects of newsworthiness they deal with and only differ in their labeling/naming
practices. Likewise, new news values have been added into the mix, some of which point to
vastly different aspects of the news production process. The need for such changes or additions
are rarely explained or justified. Another problematic issue concerns the nature or status of
news values. Are news values the values that journalists hold, the selection criteria that they
apply, the perceived qualities of material events, or values that can be discovered in published
news stories? What is at stake here is the ontological status of news values, which is a point that
will be taken up in the next section.
Evaluating Research on News Values
The formalization of news identification and selection has been an ongoing process that both
journalists and academics have struggled to conceptualize since the idea of news values was
first conceived. In the 1870s, journalists began discussions that sought to legitimize their role in
selecting news. These included viewing news judgment as a “special skill that journalists
possessed,” the rationalization of this judgement in terms of the “external qualities of events,”
and the explanation of news judgment in terms of the “social and economic values of the
information provided” (Vos & Finneman, 2017, p. 270). That such discussion continues to this
day is testimony to the myriad of factors that influence news selection and points to the difficulty
for researchers in distinguishing between them for analytical purposes.
This final section aims to tease out the conceptualization of and differentiation between
professional journalistic values more generally and news values more specifically. This is
because there has been a proliferation of news values since Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) seminal
study that relate to vastly different aspects of journalism as a social practice to the extent that
the term news values has become so diffuse and potentially confusing that it is in danger of
losing some of its worth as a theoretical concept (Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 32).
Page 10 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Conceptualizing Values in the News
At any given moment in the production of news, there are a number of “values” at play that are
likely to influence story selection (Bednarek & Caple, 2017, pp. 41–42). These include the
professional moral/ethical values that newsworkers adhere to and that are enshrined in codes of
practice. Commercial values relating to business models or economic conditions influence the
selection of news. The rhetorical goals of news writing and editing, values in the news text, are
also said to influence story selection. A well-written story is more likely to be selected for
publication than one that is lacking in clarity or linguistic competence. Other values in the news
process, for example, the mix of different kinds of stories, the availability of reporters and
photographers, or access to prefabricated press releases, all influence story selection. In
addition, there are the values in the news actors and events that influence the likelihood that
they will register as newsworthy and therefore result in their selection for consideration for
publication. For some researchers, all of these values fall under the remit of news values, while
others delimit the scope of the term news values depending on which aspect of the news process
they are focusing on. This section attempts to offer some clarity around these conceptualizations
of values and suggests that differentiation between them may assist both in deciding research
methods and analytical frameworks to be applied. This, in turn, should allow researchers to offer
robust (or more qualified) answers to the critical question of why a particular event (and not
another) has been published as news.
Professional Values
In contexts such as the news media, professional values form the basis of standards, ethics, and
principles that newsworkers apply in their daily routines. Such values or standards include the
following:
• trust, independence, impartiality, honesty, focus on audience, quality and value for money,
creativity, respect, diversity, team spirit (BBC);
• truth, speed, accuracy, preciseness, honesty, integrity, fairness, independence,
transparency, ethical behavior, careful/unbiased/unaltered, transmitted in many ways
(Associated Press);
• truth, fairness, impartiality, transparency, integrity, accuracy, independence (New York
Times);
• truth, factuality, accuracy, clarity, honesty, courage, fairness, impartiality, balance,
independence, credibility, diversity, respect of audience, transparency, diversity, support of
colleagues (Al Jazeera).
News organizations refer to these ideals as “our values” (BBC) or “news values &
principles” (Associated Press), or as “standards and ethics” (New York Times), or present them
in a code of practice (Al Jazeera).8 Encapsulated in this moral philosophical perspective on value
creation in journalism (Picard, 2010) are the traditional fourth-estate ideals that the public
needs information in order to be able to participate in democratic governance and to be engaged
in society. News organizations facilitate this by presenting themselves as the “trusted advisor,
respected interpreter, providing leadership, clarity, knowledge” (Picard, 2010, p. 120). Like in
Page 11 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
other industries, these are values that constitute workplace culture: They are the ethical
standards and aspirational goals of the newsroom.
For some researchers, these professional/moral/philosophical values fall within the remit of
news values (Fuller, 1996; Johnson & Kelly, 2003). Other researchers view concepts such as
fairness, audience interest, and public service as separate to newsworthiness, instead figuring
among a wide range of criteria that determine what will be published (Bednarek & Caple, 2017;
Waisbord, 2009, p. 374), and their influence on story selection is most likely to be revealed
through interviews with newsworkers and observations of professional practice.
Commercial Values
In addition to professional/moral/ethical values are the commercial values associated with
quality, value for money, and convenience (transmitted in many ways). Circulation and
readership, organizational structure, and competition between news organizations are all
commercial pressures that influence story selection. A story may also be corrupted by other
external influences such as a proprietor, advertiser, or politician. For some researchers, these
are also news values: for example, Competition, Organizational Requirements, and External
Factors (Bell, 1991, p. 159; Brighton & Foy, 2007, p. 29; Gans, 2004, pp. 78–79). Commercial
imperatives do influence story selection, and if news values are the criteria applied in story
selection, it is not surprising that commercial values also figure in the analysis of news values.
However, the news media industry is in a constant state of evolution and is prone to sudden
change. The 2010s, for example, has brought unprecedented upheaval to job security and
stability among editorial staff, especially in relation to photojournalism. Entire photography
departments have been dismissed (e.g., Chicago Sun-Times, United States) or depleted to
skeletal levels (e.g., Sydney Morning Herald, Australia), and this has had an impact on the
availability of news photography. The influence of such monumental change on story selection
would require longitudinal study, and it would be difficult to generalize beyond the specific
context in which such change has been implemented.
Therefore, some researchers see the value in separating out commercial values as worthy of
attention in their own right and in specific contexts and do not include them in their lists of news
values. O’Neill and Harcup (2008), for example, see “occupational routines, budgets, the market,
and ideology, as well as wider global cultural, economic and political considerations” (p. 171) as
other factors at play in the news process that are also worthy of attention (see also Tunstall,
1971, p. 23), while Bednarek and Caple (2017, p. 41) place commercial values in the category of
“news selection factors” and exclude them from their discursive approach to news values
analysis.
Rhetorical Values
Considerations of style, the structure of the story, and the clarity of the construction of
information are glossed by a number of researchers as the news values of Unambiguity,
Simplification, Brevity, and Clarity (Bell, 1991, p. 78; Conley & Lamble, 2006, p. 42; Galtung &
Ruge, 1965, p. 66; Golding & Elliott, 1979, p. 120; Johnson-Cartee, 2005, p. 129; Østgaard, 1965,
p. 45). Such “values in the news text” (Bell, 1991, p. 160, italics in original) are similar to the
Page 12 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
values that Cameron finds in style books (correctness, consistency, clarity, and concision) and
explains as defining “good writing” (Cameron, 1996, p. 319). One could argue that an articulate,
clearly argued story is much more likely to be selected for publication than one with multiple
linguistic errors and factual ambiguities and thus consider rhetorical values as news values.
Alternatively, one might consider clarity, brevity, etc., as “general linguistic characteristics
expected of a news story” and categorize these “values” as “news writing objectives” and not as
news values (Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 41). Similarly, Cotter (1999) mentions brevity and
clarity alongside other values as examples of “[r]hetorical goals in newswriting” (p. 174).
Values in the News Process
A number of other routines impact on journalism as a social practice, and these may be glossed
as “values in the news process” (Bell, 1991, p. 158, italics in original). These include balance in
content provision and factors relating to the news agenda and news cycle. For example, a
concern for how news items fit with the other items around them ensures a balanced spread of
items with minimal duplication (Brighton & Foy, 2007, p. 26). Thus, a news organization may
choose to cover only one of several very similar events that have occurred on the same day,
simply to ensure their “fit” within a balanced program or edition. A number of researchers label
this “fit” as the news values of Composition, Co-option, and Story Balance (Bell, 1991, p. 159;
Brighton & Foy, 2007, p. 26; Galtung & Ruge, 1965, p. 67; Gans, 2004, pp. 78–79). In relation to
the news agenda/cycle, a number of researchers have proposed the news values of Frequency,
Continuity, The News Barrier, Predictability, Follow-up, and News Agenda among others (Bell,
1991, p. 15, 151; Galtung & Ruge, 1965, pp. 66–67; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001, p. 279; Østgaard,
1965, p. 51; Schulz, 1982, p. 151). Such values are neatly summed up by Bell’s (1991, p. 15)
explanation that “once something is in the news, it tends to stay there.” Again, there are
researchers who argue that factors such as space, content mix, deadlines, and others are best
treated as “factors other than newsworthiness” (Cotter, 2010, p. 80). To these, one might add
other factors that influence news selection and production, such as the availability of a reporter,
material and sources, news cycles, or information gleaned from audience analytics (e.g.,
perceived shareability).
The routines, practices, and conditions thus far described exist no matter the event that is
unfolding in the world and all influence news story selection to some degree. Research into
these practices helps the analyst to answer the question why certain stories have been published
and not others, and their impact on story selection is most likely to be gleaned from
ethnographic studies of newsroom practice; or in the case of rhetorical values, through linguistic
analysis of lexical choice, generic structure, and cohesion. Most researchers, however, use
content analysis of published news stories to hypothesize why one story and not another has
been chosen for publication, a method that has been widely acknowledged as more suited to
revealing news treatment rather than news selection (O’Neill & Harcup, 2008, p. 171; see also
Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 33; Harrison, 2006; Hartley, 1982, p. 79; Staab, 1990). However, this
is as much a conceptual issue as it is a methodological issue, and the ever-broadening inclusion
of disparate practices in the production of news under the term “news values” has exacerbated
this problem. The triangulation of methods (e.g., ethnographic with content and [multimodal]
discourse analysis) and the delimiting of the point of focus to a particular stage in the production
process may help alleviate such problems. For example, some researchers focus squarely on
Page 13 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
news treatment and thus aim to only answer the question of how an event has been constructed
as newsworthy (e.g., Bednarek & Caple, 2017).
Values in Events and News Actors
If newsworthiness is defined according to whether an event is worthy of being reported as news,
there must be something about events that initially attracts the attention of journalists. Herein
one may detect another set of values, values that are associated with particular news actors and
the events that they are involved in. These include Eliteness, Personalization, Impact, Recency,
Consonance, Negativity, and Proximity among others (Bednarek & Caple, 2017; Bell, 1991;
Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001; Masterton, 2005;
Schulz, 1982).
Most researchers talk about news values and newsworthiness as characteristics of events, that
the events themselves are somehow invested or infused with newsworthiness (Cotter, 2010;
Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001; Machin & Niblock, 2006, p. 27; Rössler et al.,
2011, p. 417). However, such conflation of events or information with newsworthiness has not
gone unchallenged. As Bednarek and Caple (2017, p. 31) note, talking about an event’s news
value or its newsworthy properties is problematic in that “(i) it treats events as monolithic; (ii) it
assumes newsworthiness can easily be objectively determined and that events are either
newsworthy or not; and (iii) it seemingly ignores human intervention (social cognition and
discursive mediation).”
One method of exploring how news values relate to events and news actors is by adopting a
discursive perspective. This approach aligns with Galtung and Ruge’s (1965, p. 71) notion of
“distortion,” which suggests that the image of the world in the news is one that has been
constructed (or “distorted”) through discourse. Thus, while there is no denying the material
reality of an event, it is in the narration of this event that it is discursively constructed as
newsworthy (Bednarek & Caple, 2017). This is a point also noted by Vos and Finneman (2017, p.
277) when they state, “events do not possess drama, they are narrated dramatically.”
Page 14 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Dimensions of Newsworthiness
The foundation of journalistic practice is to promote public accountability of the powerful and to
encourage a well-informed citizenry. This is achieved through the telling of stories. How these
stories become news can be investigated through the lens of news values analysis. As this article
has revealed, the concept of news values has been applied to a wide range of practices and
conditions that impact on the routines of journalistic practice. Important for researchers moving
forward with news values analysis is to assess where in the process of news gathering and
production their attention is directed and whether the methods chosen are best suited to
analyzing newsworthiness. One way of achieving this is to recognize that news values have
material, cognitive, social, and discursive dimensions (Bednarek, 2016; Bednarek & Caple,
2017): An event in its material reality holds potential news value for a given community
(material); newsworkers and audience members have beliefs about news values and
newsworthiness (cognitive); news values are applied as selection criteria in journalistic practice
(social); and news values can be communicated through discourse (discursive). Recognizing
these four dimensions allows the researcher to explore connections and interactions between
them in a more transparent, replicable, and reliable manner, which is ultimately the foundation
of scholarly practice.
Additional Resources
Discursive News Value Analysis (DNVA) is a website dedicated providing example analyses,
ideas for research projects, data visualization, and references to select publications applying
DNVA. Available at https://www.newsvaluesanalysis.com/.
Galtung-Institut. An update on Galtung and Ruge’s approach to news values given by Prof.
Galtung in 2014. Available at https://www.galtung-institut.de/en/2015/galtung-and-ruge-newsvalues-an-update-by-prof-galtung-october-2014/.
Further Reading
Bednarek, M. (2016). Voices and values in the news: News media talk, news values and
attribution. Discourse, Context & Media, 11, 27–37.
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create
newsworthiness. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Brighton, P., & Foy, D. (2007). News values. London, UK: SAGE.
Caple, H., & Bednarek, M. (2013). Delving into the discourse: Approaches to news values in
journalism studies and beyond. Working Paper. Oxford, UK: The Reuters Institute for the Study
of Journalism, The University of Oxford.
Page 15 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Caple, H., & Bednarek, M. (2016). Rethinking news values: What a discursive approach can tell
us about the construction of news discourse and news photography. Journalism, 17(4), 435–455.
Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo,
Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64–90.
Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2016). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism
Studies. Advance online publication.
Strömbäck, J., Karlsson, M., & Hopmann, D. N. (2012). Determinants of news content:
Comparing journalists’ perceptions of the normative and actual impact of different event
properties when deciding what’s news. Journalism Studies, 13(5–6), 718–728.
Vos, T. P., & Finneman, T. (2017). The early historical construction of journalism’s gatekeeping
role. Journalism, 18(3), 265–280.
References
Ahva, L., & Pantti, M. (2014). Proximity as a journalistic keyword in the digital era: A study on
the “closeness” of amateur news images. Digital Journalism, 2(3), 322–333.
Allan, S. (1999). News culture. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.
Barthes, R. (1977). Image, music, text. London, UK: Fontana.
Bednarek, M. (2016). Voices and values in the news: News media talk, news values and
attribution. Discourse, Context & Media, 11, 27–37.
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2014). Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological
framework for analyzing news discourse in critical discourse analysis and beyond. Discourse &
Society, 25(2), 135–158.
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create
newsworthiness. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bell, A. (1991). The language of news media. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Bell, A. (1995). News time. Time & Society, 4(3), 305–328.
Brighton, P., & Foy, D. (2007). News values. London, UK: SAGE.
Cameron, D. (1996). Style policy and style politics: A neglected aspect of the language of the
news. Media Culture & Society, 18, 315–333.
Caple, H. (2013). Photojournalism: A social semiotic approach. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Caple, H., & Bednarek, M. (2013). Delving into the discourse: Approaches to news values in
journalism studies and beyond. Working Paper. Oxford, UK: The Reuters Institute for the Study
of Journalism, The University of Oxford.
Page 16 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Caple, H., & Bednarek, M. (2016). Rethinking news values: What a discursive approach can tell
us about the construction of news discourse and news photography. Journalism, 17(4), 435–455.
Chang, T. K., Shoemaker, P. J., & Brendlinger, N. (1987). Determinants of international news
coverage in the U.S. media. Communication Research, 14(4), 396–414.
Conley, D., & Lamble, S. (2006). The daily miracle: An introduction to journalism (3rd ed.).
Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.
Cotter, C. (1999). Language and media: Five facts about the fourth estate. In R. S. Wheeler (Ed.),
The workings of language. From prescriptions to perspectives (pp. 165–179). Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Cotter, C. (2010). News talk. Investigating the language of journalism. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Craig, G. (1994). Press photographs and news values. Australian Studies in Journalism, 3, 182–
200.
Dick, M. (2014). Interactive infographics and news values. Digital Journalism, 2(4), 490–506.
Van Dijk, T. (1988). News as discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Eilders, C. (1997). Nachrichtenfaktoren und Rezeption: Eine empirische Analyse zur Auswahl
und Verarbeitung politischer Information [News factors and reception: An empirical analysis of
the audience’s selection and retention processes in political communication]. Opladen, Germany:
Westdeutscher Verlag.
Eilders, C. (2006). News factors and news decisions. Theoretical and methodological advances in
Germany. Communications: European Journal of Communication Research, 31, 5–24.
Fuller, J. (1996). News values: Ideas for an information age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo,
Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64–90.
Gans, H. J. (2004). Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News,
Newsweek and Time. Evanson, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Golding, P., & Elliott, P. (1979). Making the news. London, UK: Longman.
Hall, S. (1973). The determinations of news photographs. In S. Cohen & J. Young (Eds.), The
manufacture of news: Social problems, deviance and the mass media (pp. 176–190). London, UK:
Constable.
Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies,
2(2), 261–280.
Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2016). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism
Studies. Advance online publication.
Harrison, J. (2006). News. London, UK: Routledge.
Page 17 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Hartley, J. (1982). Understanding news. London, UK: Methuen.
Hoskins, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2007). Television and terror: Conflicting times and the crisis of
news discourse. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Johnson, T. J., & Kelly, J. D. (2003). Have new media editors abandoned the old media ideals? The
journalistic values of online newspaper editors. The New Jersey Journal of Communication,
11(2), 115–134.
Johnson-Cartee, K. S. (2005). News narratives and news framing: Constructing political reality.
Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
Kepplinger, H. M., & Ehmig, S. C. (2006). Predicting news decisions. An empirical test of the
two-component theory of news selection. Communications: The European Journal of
Communication Research, 31, 25–43.
Lee, J. H., & Choi, Y. J. (2009). News values and sports events: An application of a
newsworthiness model on the World Cup coverage of US and Korean media. Asian Journal of
Communication, 19(3), 302–318.
Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York, NY: Free Press. (Reprint 1965.)
Machin, D., & Niblock, S. (2006). News production. Theory and practice. London, UK: Routledge.
Maier, M., & Ruhrmann, G. (2008). Celebrities in action and other news. News factors of German
TV news 1992–2004: Results from a content analysis. Human Communication, 11(1), 201–218.
Masterton, M. (2005). Asian journalists seek values worth preserving . Asia Pacific Media
Educator, 16(6), 41–48.
O’Neill, D., & Harcup, T. (2008). News values and selectivity. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen & T.
Hanitzsch (Eds.), Handbook of journalism studies (pp. 161–174). Hoboken, NJ: Routledge.
Østgaard, E. (1965). Factors influencing the flow of news. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 39–
63.
Palmer, J. (1998). News production, news values. In A. Briggs & P. Cobley (Eds.), The media: An
introduction (pp. 377–391). Harlow, UK: Longman.
Pantti, M. (2010). The value of emotion: An examination of television journalists’ notions on
emotionality. European Journal of Communication, 25(2), 168–181.
Picard, R. G. (2010). Value creation and the future of news organisations: Why and how
journalism must change to remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Barcelona, Spain: Media
XXI.
Rössler, P., Bomhoff, J., Haschke, J. F., Kersten, J., & Müller, R. (2011). Selection and impact of
press photography: An empirical study on the basis of photo news factors. Communications, 36,
415–439.
Schulz, W. F. (1982). News structure and people’s awareness of political events. International
Communication Gazette, 30, 139–153.
Page 18 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Shoemaker, P. J., Danielian, L. H., & Brendlinger, N. (1991). Deviant acts, risky business and U.S.
interests: The newsworthiness of world events. Journalism Quarterly, 68(4), 781–795.
Singletary, M. W., & Lamb, C. (1984). News values in award-winning photos. Journalism
Quarterly, 61(1), 104–108, 233.
Staab, J. F. (1990). The role of news factors in news selection: A theoretical reconsideration.
European Journal of Communication, 5, 423–443.
Strömbäck, J., Karlsson, M., & Hopmann, D. N. (2012). Determinants of news content:
Comparing journalists’ perceptions of the normative and actual impact of different event
properties when deciding what’s news. Journalism Studies, 13(5–6), 718–728.
Trilling, D., Tolochko, P., & Burscher, B. (2017). From newsworthiness to shareworthiness: How
to predict news sharing on article characteristics. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly,
94(1), 38–60.
Tunstall, J. (Ed.). (1970). Media sociology: A reader. London, UK: Constable.
Tunstall, J. (1971). Journalists at work: Specialist correspondents: Their news organizations,
news sources, and competitor-colleagues. London, UK: Constable.
Vos, T. P., & Finneman, T. (2017). The early historical construction of journalism’s gatekeeping
role. Journalism, 18(3), 265–280.
Waisbord, S. (2009). Advocacy journalism in a global context. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen & T.
Hanitzsch (Eds.), The handbook of journalism studies (pp. 371–385). New York, NY: Routledge.
Wendelin, M., Engelmann, I., & Neubarth, J. (2015). User rankings and journalistic news
selection: Comparing news values and topics. Journalism Studies, 18(2), 135–153.
Westerståhl, J., & Johansson, F. (1994). Foreign news: News values and ideologies. European
Journal of Communication, 9, 71–89.
Notes:
(1.) While Galtung and Ruge (1965) use the term news factors, subsequent research has
interchangeably used both news factors and news values to the point that the two are now
synonymous for most researchers. Some, however, do maintain a distinction between the two.
Kepplinger and Ehmig (2006, p. 28), for example, propose a two-component theory of news
selection comprising the basic elements of news factors and the news value of news factors.
According to this approach, the relative impact of characteristics of news stories—the news
factors—on the selection of news stories is called news value. News values are not qualities of
news stories, but characteristics of journalists—their judgments about the relevance of news
factors (p. 27), while news factors are by definition “qualities of news stories” (p. 27), which
“might be the degree of damage reported, the status of people involved, the geographical
distance between the event and the place where the recipients of the news stories live” (p. 27).
(2.) Staab (1990, p. 425) suggests that Østgaard was the founding researcher of news factors
and that Galtung and Ruge further developed his theory into their 12 news factors.
Page 19 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
(3.) More recent research applying approaches to news values analysis pioneered by these
German scholars can be found in Maier and Ruhrmann (2008) who use Schulz’s higher-order
dimensions of news selection, and in Wendelin, Engelmann, and Neubarth (2015) who use 19
news factor variables to explore how user rankings may be used to reveal audience news
selection preferences.
(4.) Bednarek and Caple (2017, p. 109) stress the importance of being sensitive to the ways in
which image content and image capture interact, and advise against using their list of visual
devices for constructing news values as an automatic check list for the construction of a
particular news value. This is because the same visual device may construct or enhance a range
of news values depending on the content/subject matter of the image. For example, it is not the
case that any and all blurry images/excessive camera movement construct Negativity. A camera
operator may immerse herself in a crowd at a party or a street parade and capture the
celebrations of people while being jostled, thus producing images with a lot of movement and
less than perfect quality. Such camera technique would construct Superlativeness (not
Negativity), as it captures the scope and scale of the celebrations.
(5.) Shareability or shareworthiness are concepts that have emerged very recently in relation to
reception studies, and they examine the extent to which audiences make use of the same news
values as journalists in deciding which stories they share via social media (see e.g., Trilling,
Tolochko, & Burscher, 2017; Wendelin et al., 2015).
(6.) However, their news value Aesthetic Appeal (concerning the “beauty” of news visuals) is
only postulated for visuals, and not for language, as explained in Bednarek and Caple (2017, pp.
66–67).
(7.) DNVA has been applied by a number of researchers examining the construction of
newsworthiness in relation to climate change and environmental disaster reporting; popular
science journalism; marriage equality; and reporting in other languages (Chinese and Iranian). A
full list of publications can be viewed at the DNVA website.
(8.) These codes/principles are available at the following websites: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/mission_and_values; http://www.ap.org/company/newsvalues; http://www.nytco.com/who-we-are/culture/standards-and-ethics/; http://
www.aljazeera.com/aboutus/2006/11/2008525185733692771.html.
Helen Caple
School of the Arts and Media, University of South New Wales, Australia
Page 20 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018
News Values and Newsworthiness
Page 21 of 21
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, COMMUNICATION
(communication.oxfordre.com). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal
Notice).
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 July 2018