COM 140 - News Values

COM 140– News Values
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
News Values

COM 140 - Storytelling
News Values
● Broad categories of terms determine whether a story is news or not.
● The number varies but under a broad conceptualization, there are 10
values that determine, either alone or in connection with other values, that
whether a story is news or not.

News Values
● Immediacy
● Proximity
● Consequence
● Conflict

News Values
● Oddity
● Sex
● Emotion
● Prominence

News Values
● Suspense
● Progress

News Values
● If any one of these elements is present, a story has news value. However,
many stories contain more than one element.
● The top concern should be to develop an understanding of what
constitutes an interesting news story.

News Values
● If it is interesting to you, chances are that it is interesting to others.
● In writing, complexity often gets in the way of clarity of language.
● The same happens in developing ideas for stories.

News Values
● A story that has just happened is news; one that happened a few days ago
is history. Immediacy is timeliness.
● Few events of major significance can stand up as news if they fail to meet
the test of timeliness; however, an event that occurred some time ago may
still be timely if it has just been revealed.

News Values
● Readers are interested in what happens close to them.
● Proximity is the nearness of an event to the readers or listeners and how
closely it touches their lives.
● People are interested mainly in themselves, their families, their friends,
and their hometowns.

News Values
● News of change or news that affects human relations is news of
consequence.
● The more people affected, the greater the news value.

News Values
● Sporting events, wars and revolutions are the most common examples of
conflict in the news.
● People may be pitted against people, team against team, nation against
nation or humans against the natural elements.

News Values
● The unusual or strange event will help lift a story out of the ordinary. If an
ordinary pilot parachuted out of an ordinary plane with an ordinary
parachute and makes an ordinary landing, there is no real news value.
● It is news if the aviator has only one leg; or if the parachute fails to open
and the pilot lands safely.

News Values
● Sometimes sex is the biggest single element in news, or at least it appears
to be the element that attracts readers the most.
● Consider all the stories in papers that involve men and women—sports,
financial news, society and crime. It concerns is only if the person is a
public figure.

News Values
● The emotional element, sometimes called the
human-interest element, covers all the feelings that human beings have,
including happiness, sadness, anger, sympathy, ambition, hate, love, envy,
generosity and humor.
- Emotion is comedy; emotion is tragedy; it is the interest we
have in each other.

News Values
● Prominence is a one-word way of saying “names make news.” When a
person is prominent, like the President of the United States, almost
anything he does is newsworthy—even his church attendance.

News Values
● The suspense element is increasingly present in our social media and
cable television consumption.
● It is a day-by-day or hour-by-hour account of some high-visibility event
that is often available online.

News Values
● In a technologically advanced society, we are
interested in gadgets, medicine and stuff that allegedly makes life better. It is
known as progress.
● Anything new in a technological sense is progress.

Checklist
● How do you identify a subject for a long-form or small-scale piece of
reporting?
● How do you know if long-form is the appropriate genre for the information
or whether a blurb will do?
● How do you know what is appropriate?

Checklist
● Here are checklists of tactics designed to facilitate decisions on what to
pursue in terms of subject and how to pursue it in terms of writing.

Checklist
● First, understand that stories are all around us.
● The reason people like stories because they often see their lives in terms
of the classic narrative arc identified by Aristotle in Poetics.

Checklist
● In journalism, stories are written not for dramatic emphasis, though, but for
information.
● The most important information is listed first, followed by amplification and
secondary information along an arc.
● We call this Who/What/When/Where/How/Why.

Checklist
● That’s the first checklist.
● Does the story have a newsworthy narrative arc that can be clearly
identified?
● In short, is it a story relevant as news and worth the audience’s time?

Checklist
● But where to begin?
● Start with what’s known as a small-scale narrative.
● That’s a story between 400 and 1,000 words, tops.
● But it holds an entire universe in that format.

Checklist
● A long-form story requires deeper, more expansive reporting.
● Think of it as novel versus the shorter small-scale narrative form.

Checklist
● Whether long-form of small-scale, deeply reported and observed stories
require a reporting process that can be outlined by a checklist.

Checklist
● Reporting Technique
- Find the full story through reporting.
* Take detailed notes of observations.
- Find people to interview

Checklist
● Writing Technique
- Identify the angle
- Follow the inverted pyramid structure

COM 140 - News Values

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