News values

News values are "criteria that influence the selection and presentation of events as published news." These values help explain what makes something "newsworthy."

Journalists use news values to decide which events will be reported on and how they will be presented to their viewers. Journalists explain why some events deserve widespread coverage and why others do not. Johan Galtung and Mari Hulmboe Ruge (1956) identified what influences news selection. Factors that were taken into account include: Impact on society, current conflict, prominence, negativity, and proximity. By analyzing international news in Norwegian newspapers, these journalists found stories that include the criteria they’re looking for. The stories involved conflict, major figures, or significant events (which were more likely to make it to final publishing). The criteria that these journalists implemented were shown across multiple news outlets, indicating a degree of universality in how editors select news articles. In the present day, Journalists have further explored and applied these values in practice. Along with the other guidelines, it is as important to follow organizational routines, deadlines, and understand audience expectations before covering an important event. These two together become the foundation of covering news in general. In newsrooms today, these foundational works provide a framework for deciding what news is selected.

News values are not universal and can vary between different cultures. Among the many lists of news values that have been drawn up by scholars and journalists, some attempt to describe news practices across cultures, while others have become remarkably specific to the press of particular (often Western) nations. In the Western tradition, decisions on the selection and prioritization of news are made by on the basis of their experience and intuition, although analysis by Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge showed that several factors are consistently applied across a range of news organizations. Their theory was tested on the news presented in four different Norwegian newspapers from the Congo and Cuban crisis of July 1960 and the Cyprus crisis of March–April 1964. Results were mainly consistent with their theory and hypotheses. Galtung later said that the media have misconstrued his work and become far too negative, sensational, and adversarial.

Methodologically and conceptually, news values can be approached from four different perspectives: material (focusing on the material reality of events), cognitive (focusing on people's beliefs and value systems), social (focusing on journalistic practice), and discursive (focusing on the discourse). A discursive perspective tries to systematically examine how news values such as negativity, proximity, eliteness, and others, are constructed through words and images in published news stories. This approach is influenced by linguistics and social semiotics, and is called "discursive news values analysis" (DNVA). It focuses on the "distortion" step in Galtung and Ruge's chain of news communication, by analysing how events are discursively constructed as newsworthy.