JRN 260 - News Values

JRN 260 – News Writing
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
News Values

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.
● Please note: As Dr. Pinker states, 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 compelling narrative arc that can
be clearly identified?
● In short, is it a story worth reading?

Checklist
● "The idea is everything. If the idea is crappy, the story is
mediocre at best. The idea has to have some action.
There’s got to be something at stake. Most people try to
do too much. If you don’t narrow it down, it’s hard to go
deep enough to show how they’re changing over time.”
— Kelley Benham French

Checklist
● One of the great factual writers of the past 60 years is
John McPhee.
● When he started writing, he simply asked friends for
ideas on things to write about.

Checklist
● "When I was starting out, I said to friends, I’m looking
for ideas. And a high-school friend named Bob
VanDeventer said, Why don’t you write about the Pine
Barrens? And I said, The what? I was born and raised
in New Jersey, but I’d never heard of them …

Checklist
● "So VanDeventer starts telling me about the pines, and
how there were holes in the ground that had no bottom.
And that the people who lived there were odd, to put it
mildly. He had a whole lot of things that he had learned
somewhere about the Pine Barrens, and with respect
for my good friend Bob, all of these things were wrong
…

Checklist
● “But what he did was light the spark. It was in New
Jersey, and it related to the woods, two things that I was
interested in.”

Checklist
● McPhee said there are “zillions of ideas out there—they
stream by like neutrons.”

Checklist
● But where to begin?
● Start with what’s known as a small-scale narrative.
● That’s a story between 500 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
● Here it is, with pieces contributed by Steve Buttry and
Henry Miller:

Checklist
● Ideas
- Move beyond meetings/routine.
- Move beyond the mainstream.
- Move beyond what others see to what you see.
- Study your visible universe.
- Peak around and behind that universe of
experiences.

Checklist
● Ideas
- “Keep Human, Go Places … “ (Miller)

Checklist
● Reporting Technique
- Find the full story through reporting.
* Take detailed notes of observations.
- Take a fresh approach to reporting.
- Find (and then personify) statistics.
- Find experts/studies/academic/archival stuff.

Checklist
● Reporting Technique
- Compile the totality of information about a story’s
subject.
- Interview as many people connected to the subject
as possible. When you hear a story for the third
time, you’ve heard it all.

Checklist
● Writing Technique
- Then tell story honestly.
- Write first – always. (Miller)
- Create a new checklist of verification.

JRN 260 - News Values

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