A2 Media Studies- News Values

1. What makes a News Story
Newsworthy?

2. Harold Evans
Former Times and Sunday Time editor, Harold Evans,
stated that a news story…

3. Galtung and Ruge- News Values
The most well known lists of news values are those of the media
researchers Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge. They
analysed a range of international news stories, in order to find
out what aspects these new stories had in common, and which
aspects placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide.
The pair came up with a scoring system, as such, that if a news
story scores highly in each value, then it will be at the start of the
news program or make it on the front page of a newspaper.
The arranged the different values into 3 categories:
 Impact
 Audience identification
 Pragmatics of media coverage

4. Impact
The Impact category consists of the values:
 Threshold- the bigger the impact the story has, the people it affects
and therefore the more extreme the effect or the more money or
resources it involves.
 Frequency- events which occur suddenly are more readily reported
than those that occur gradually or that are long term trends.
 Negativity- it’s obvious that bad news is more exciting than good
news. Stories to do with death, violence, natural disasters etc… are
always rated more than positive stories due to the fact they are
more likely to score high on other news values.
 Unexpectedness- if an event is abnormal then it is more likely that it
will make the news more than normal, day to day events.
 Unambiguity- events that are easy to understand and are open to
more than one interpretation are more likely to be shown on the
news as they are easily grassed and discussed.

5. Audience Identification
Audience Identification is made up of four main points, which are:
 Personalisation- stories which are focused solely on a person
receive a lot of coverage, even more so if it is a well known person.
This is purely because of the simple fact than people are interested
in other people.
 Meaningfulness- this is based around the idea of cultural promixty;
stories which allow the audience to relate receive more attention.
 Reference to elite nations- stories which are based on global
powers, receive a lot of coverage from the media. Also, countries
which have similar culture to their own country receive much
attention.
 Reference to elite persons- the media are focus hugely on the rich,
powerful and famous people.

6. Pragmatics of Media Coverage
Pragmatics of media coverage have three key
points:
Consonance- stories that are compatible with the
medias expectations get more coverage than
those stories that contravene them.
Continuity- stories which have a momentum to
them and is a running story will have a lot of
coverage.
Composition- similar stories compete with each
other for news coverage in order for variety.