Discuss the Role of News Values in Predicting What News Journalists Report and How They Manufacture Stories.

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It is known that journalists measure potential news items against a range of criteria known as ‘news values’ (Harcup 2009). This essay will determine the extent to which such news values are used in terms of predicting what news journalists report and how they manufacture stories. As Owen Spencer -Thomas points out; information is constantly arriving to newsrooms from a variety of different sources. This makes the job of a news editor difficult as he/she must be selective and filter out information that is not newsworthy. Reports which are interesting and regarded as being newsworthy are distinguished by a broadly agreed set of characteristics known as ‘news values’. These values provide journalists with a mechanism to process and sort through the vast amount of information available to them. However, the reality of working in journalism means time is not of the essence as tight deadlines have to be met. Therefore, in practice, the journalist will make a judgement on whether or not a story will be of interest to the reader based on experience and intuition, rather than actually ticking off from a checklist. (Spencer-Thomas, 2013). Despite this, studies of news productions have highlighted that a common set of ‘news values’ are applied across a wide range of print, broadcast and online news organisations across the world. One of the best known lists of news values was drawn up by media researchers Johan Galtung and Marie Holmboe Ruge (Harcup 2009:39). They analysed international news stories to find out what factors they had in common, and what factors placed them at the top of the news agenda worldwide. Overall, they reached the conclusion that there was twelve key news values; ‘frequency’. ‘threshold’, ‘unambiguity’, ‘meaningfulness’, ‘consonance’, ‘unexpectedness’, ‘continuity’, ‘composition’ and ‘reference to elite nations, people and persons’. Although

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