In today’s lecture we looked at three
topics; News Values, Agenda Setting and The Political Economy. News values are
defined as ‘The
degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story, and the attention that is
paid by an audience.’
News values include impact, audience
identification, pragmatics and source influence. Impact is what gives something
the ‘gee whiz’ factor, audience identification is telling stories that relate
to the reader and the cultural milieu, pragmatics are ethics, facticity and the
twenty-four hour news cycle and source influence is the inter-relatedness of
journalism with PR, enabling both to write better stories.
We explored how news values are disparate across
different news stations and in different cultural contexts and arriving back at
the old inverted triangle of newsworthiness we looked at how predominantly, the
structure stays the same. Colloquially, the saying in terms of newsworthiness
has always been ‘If it bleeds it leads,’ however Bruce informed us that in
terms of local media there has been a shift in values and the importance of
immediacy in gaining attention - now the saying has altered to ‘if it’s local
it leads.’ There are no official guidelines to newsworthiness, it is simply up
to the journalist to decide which story will incite public attention.
There are several theorists who propose hypotheses’
in regards to newsworthiness such as Golding and Elliot who outline a series of
elements of newsorthiness Galtung and Ruge and their postulations of
additivity, complementarity and exclusion.
We also looked at Murray Masterson’s ‘Big 6’ news values which are
- Significance
- Proximity
- Conflict
- Human interest
- Novelty
- Prominence
Bruce then outlined some contemporary tensions in
terms of newsworthiness such as the commercialization of media and social life,
the relationship journalism and public relations and the ideals versus reality
contention in journalism.
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