Newsworthy

Types of news values

• Frequency: Events that occur suddenly and fit well with the news organization's schedule are more likely to be reported than those that occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night. Long-term trends are not likely to receive much coverage.
• Timeliness: Events that have only just happened, are current, ongoing, or are about to happen are newsworthy.
• Familiarity: To do with people or places close to the target audience. Others prefer the term Proximity for this news value, which includes geographical and cultural proximity (see "meaningfulness").
• Negativity: Bad news is more newsworthy than good news. Sometimes described as "the basic news value." Conversely, it has also been suggested that Positivity is a news value in certain cases (such as sports news, science news, feel-good tabloid stories).
• Conflict: Opposition of people or forces resulting in a dramatic effect. Events with conflict are often quite newsworthy. Sometimes included in Negativity rather than listed as a separate news value.
• Unexpectedness: Events that are out of the ordinary, unexpected, or rare are more newsworthy than routine, unsurprising events.
• Unambiguity: Events whose implications are clear make for better copy than those that are open to more than one interpretation, or where any understanding of the implications depends on first understanding the complex background in which the events take place.
• Personalization: Events that can be portrayed as the actions of individuals will be more attractive than one in which there is no such "human interest." Personalization is about whether an event can be contextualised in personal terms (affecting or involving specific, "ordinary" people, not the generalised masses).
• Meaningfulness: This relates to the sense of identification the audience has with the topic. "Cultural proximity" is a factor here—events concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the same preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different preoccupations. A related term is Relevance, which is about the relevance of the event as regards the target readers/viewers own lives or how close it is to their experiences. Impact refers more generally to an event's impact, on the target audience, or on others. An event with significant consequences (high impact) is newsworthy.
• Eliteness: Events concerned with global powers receive more attention than those concerned with less influential nations. Events concerned with the rich, powerful, famous and infamous get more coverage. Also includes the eliteness of sources – sometimes called Attribution.
• Superlativeness: Events with a large scale or scope or with high intensity are newsworthy.
• Consonance: Events that fit with the media's expectations and preconceptions receive more coverage than those that defy them (and for which they are thus unprepared). Note this appears to conflict with unexpectedness above. However, consonance really refers to the media's readiness to report an item. Consonance has also been defined as relating to editors' stereotypes and their mental scripts for how events typically proceed.