News Values

News values determine how much prominence news in given by a media outlet. In practice such decisions are made informally by editors on the basis of their experience and intuition, and analysis shows that several factors are consistently applied across a range of news organizations. In 1965, Galtung and Rung enumerated these factors. The following list is based on their analysis, which remains influential today. Boyd states that: “News journalism has a broadly agreed set of values, often referred to as ‘newsworthiness’: events suitable for news which tend to be proximity, relevance, immediacy, and drama.”

There are various factors that qualify an event to be a news story. They may include the following:

1. Timeliness/Freshness
Time factor plays an important role in the effectiveness of a news story. No body likes to read an out-dated story, even if it is very important. News is just like a perishable commodity having a very short life. We can accommodate a past time story in literature. Drama, feature, etc. but it does not work in news. Journalism’s famous slogan is that “Today news id today.”

2. Proximity or Nearness
The importance of a news greatly depends on the place of its origin. Proximity in journalism does not only refer to geographical nearness but interest or nearness as well. For example, Imran khan’s marriage took place in U.K. but the story is more interesting for the people of this part of the word. An earthquake in China killing 200 people will be less important in our newspapers than the story of earthquake killing 30 persons in Pakistan.

3. Prominence
Readers have interest in name of persons with whom they are familiar. The bigger the personality involved in the event, the greater its news value. Stories of film stars, players, politicians, philosophers and poets etc. have greater news value.

4. Magnitude
The event relating to greater loss of life, damage or natural disaster creates interest for the readers. For example, a story of fire resulting in the death of one person will have less impact than the story of fire resulting in the death of 100 people.

5. Conflict
Everybody takes interest in confrontation among people, nations and groups. The highest form of conflict is war and no war story fails to create interest for the readers.

6. Oddity/unusualness
A dog bites a common man is not news but if a man bites a dog it is great news because it is unusual. The more the event is unusual the greater its value.

7. Consequence
The news story that affects some change in the life of people will have great consequencies. For example news about budget, rise in petrol price electricity rates and increase in salary, etc. are read with great interest by people.

8. Human interest
Human interest stories deal with usual events but usually these stories involve fellow feeling, emotion of brotherhood and humanness. When a person reads about joy or sorrow or others he mentally associate himself with them. Example: A story of a child rescued by a fireman as a seven storey building caught fire has greater value than the story of the complete loss of the building.