When a story is in the making, the journalist writing the
piece has to question whether or not their story holds any news values – that is,
does it contain certain elements which will entice the audience and allow for
the piece to sell. These news values are applied to stories in the inverted
pyramid order – the values that fall closest to the audience’s interest are
placed at the start of stories, with the least important being placed last. Through
doing this, the media captures a large audience, which is precisely what
commercial media strives for in order to keep their advertisers buying space.
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| Galtung & Ruge's News Values |
Over time, news values have been narrowed and specified,
going from Galtung & Ruge’s values in
1965 to Harcup & O’Neill’s
values in 1999; these values have been employed by the media in order to
appeal to audiences and entice them into reading the entire article presented.
A few of these values include negativity (or ‘bad news’), recency, uniqueness,
celebrity and controversy. Certain news outlets rely more on some news values
than others in order to sell their news; for example, A Current Affair often falls back onto celebrity and controversy,
while Hungry Beast applies recency
and uniqueness to their articles.
Different news medium also carry different weight on their
news values; for your local newspaper, impact, recency and proximity are major
values, however for an online fashion blog, relevance and visual attractiveness
are the main news values. It is important to understand that these values have
been given weight in order to entice the audience and keep them attracted to
the article presented, rather than solely for the purpose of delivering the
most important news. Dr. Tom Linden explains this in the video below.
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