Journalistic and Commercial News Values

Abstract

Why do some events fill the columns and air time of news media, while others are ignored? Why do some stories make banner headlines whereas others merit no more than a few lines? What factors decide what news professionals consider newsworthy? Such questions are often answered-by journalists and media researchers alike-with references to journalistic news values or 'news criteria'. Some answers are normatively founded; others are pragmatic and descriptive. In the present article, I submit that editorial priorities should not be analyzed in purely journalistic terms. Instead, they should be seen as efforts to combine journalistic norms and editorial ambitions, on the one hand, with commercial norms and market objectives, on the other. Commercial Enterprise and Patron of an Institution News media have a dual nature. On the one hand they represent a societal institution that is ascribed a vital role in relation to such core political values as freedom of expression and democracy. On the other hand, they are businesses that produce commodities-information and entertainment-for a market. At the same time, because their products are descriptions of reality that influence our perceptions of the world around us, news media wield influence that extends far beyond the marketplace. Who controls the media is of significance to every member of society. As figures like Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and the new Russian media barons remind us, control of the media is a key to political power. And while many venerable industries wither and die (or undergo profound metamorphoses) the consciousness industry-as writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1974) dubbed the media and other actors in the communication sector-is rapidly expanding. Newspapers, radio programs and television transmissions differ with respect to how consumption of them affects our perception and understanding of reality. As Graham Murdoch observes: By providing accounts of the contemporary world and images of the 'good life', they play a pivotal role in shaping social consciousness, and it is this 'special relationship' between economic and cultural power that has made the issue of

The Chick Diffusion: How Newspapers Fail to Meet Normative Expectations Regarding Their Democratic Role in Public Debate

“…Our findings appear to be incompatible with the assumptions of the either/or nature of both the actor-oriented and the structural approach to media studies. Building on the idea that each article puts forth a newsworthy topic as mentioned in the news values literature (Allern 2002;Harcup and O'Neill 2017), the lack of structural problematization and the lack of a structural shift suggest that these topics did not build structurally-as would be expected from a structural approach to the media. However, the episodic and isolated coverage focused on lower level, narrower, and more specific issues, in addition to the lack of trends indicating a cumulative effect, suggest that these topics did not build thematically either-as would be expected from an actor-oriented approach to the media as a coherent collective actor.…”

Interactive Infographics and News Values

“…The rise of the network has brought 'big data' into the newsroom, but the availability of 'big data' is not a reason for investigation or coverage in itself. On the other hand, some numbers are considered more newsworthy than others amongst professionals in this field -so it may be that studies of news values (or story selection criteria) based upon normative lists (Galtung and Ruge 1965;Golding and Elliott 1979;Allern 2002) may require re-appraisal in light of this.…”

A general pattern in the construction of economic newsworthiness? Analyzing news factors in popular, quality, regional, and financial newspapers

“…Popular newspapers are strongly event and market-driven (Strömbäck et al, 2012) and aim to reach an as large as possible audience; therefore, they may particularly concentrate on the commercial news values. Being confronted with more pressure in their daily work from (a) audience figures, (b) competition with other outlets, and (c) profit motives than journalists from other outlets (Skovsgaard, 2014), tabloid and popular newspaper journalists follow more closely what the audience is interested in than broadsheet journalists (Allern, 2002) and, consequently, make different journalistic decisions (Sparks and Tulloch, 2000).…”

“…Hence, one may expect the news factor geographical proximity to be a less important news factor for financial newspapers. In contrast, market-based considerations may encourage financial press journalists to write about events from an international perspective (Allern, 2002).…”