Lecture 9

In lecture 9 we discussed “News values”, which can be defined as the degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is paid by an audience. For a news story to be valuable, it needs to provide impact, audience identification, pragmatics as well as source influence. The standard and value of a news story often vary across news services and different countries and cultures. The success of a news story is dependent on the negativity, closeness to home, recency, currency, continuity, uniqueness, simplicity, personality, expectedness and exclusivity just to name a few. I found whilst we were discussing news values, that there was a major (and unnecessary) quote overload, which all were focused on similar angles and made the lecture very repetitive and tedious. Additionally, we went through at least ten different lists of people who came up with what they thought were “news values”. Funnily enough all the lists were fairly identical except for a couple of new ideas in each theory. After finally moving on from different news values, we went on to discuss the threats to newsworthiness. Such threats include journalism and commercialisation of media and social life, journalism and public relations and journalism’s ideals and reality. This lecture was essential in learning about news values no matter how repetitive it was!