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News Values

Journalists are taught either through workplace socialization or college training that events and people may possess any of a half dozen attributes, which can make them newsworthy. Informally “scoring” potential stories for those values is one of several routines used by news workers to define, select, and deliver news.

Lists of news values offered by professional and academic authors vary, but most agree upon these six attributes: conflict (struggles featuring people, governments, or social and natural forces), impact (the number of people affected and how much they are affected), proximity (geographic or demographic closeness to the reader, listener, or viewer), timeliness (the more recent, the more newsworthy), prominence (how widely known a person or event is on the local, regional or national and international levels), and novelty (unique or bizarre people and events). Human interest sometimes is cited as a distinct attribute, but many argue that it is a component of the other six.

Novice news workers usually are taught to test for the presence of these news values by asking a classic series of questions—Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? And they learn that news is often what is different from the norm. “Man bites dog, not dog bites man,” for instance, exemplifies the novelty news value. Beginners also learn that potential stories usually should incorporate more than one value, and researchers have found that the initial paragraph or lead of most newspaper stories contain at least two news values.

Development

Determining an event or person's news value can be traced as a media routine at least to the early nineteenth-century “penny press” newspapers of Britain and the United States, the first designed for general audiences. Judgment about “news value” had undoubtedly been determined even earlier for communication not intended for wide distribution because of limited literacy. News values also were surely applied to political or business papers slanted heavily toward opinion directed to social elites.

Indeed, printed enumerations of news values date at least to a 1695 German guidebook on reading the news that listed importance and proximity. Later lists of news values worked their way into early journalism textbooks. In a revision to his 1913 Newspaper Writing and Editing text, Willard Grosvenor Bleyer (1873–35) listed timeliness and reader interest as prime news values. Bleyer further subdivided reader interest into extraordinary events; struggles for supremacy by individuals or nations; romance; mystery; adventure; human interest; and children, animals, and amusements. He wrote that audience interest in the news was proportionate to the reader's degree of familiarity with the event, the event's importance or prominence in the reader's life, and the event's proximity to the reader's home and business. He argued that the best news was that which had the greatest effect on the largest number or readers. Over time, Bleyer's list was simplified to six or seven distinct elements. The 1977 edition of Curtis D. MacDougall's (1903–85) popular Interpretative Reporting text listed news values to be timeliness, proximity, prominence, consequence (another term for impact), and human interest. Popular twenty-first-century reporting texts suggest that these values apply to both traditional as well as newer digital media.

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