News Values - Lecture 10

I have to be honest. When I saw the next few topics including this lecture I thought to myself. Please, No. Being a third year in a course made up of predominately first years already makes me feel old and sometimes a bit stupid. I put of all my journalism classes to get through all my political science ones first which is why I am starting this now.

When you get to your third year you start to hear repeats of certain topics in different courses. I remember at one point in time all my POLS classes having the exact same topic around the same time in one semester. I have done a similar course to this called Politics and the Media and we went through a lot of media works and sociology of news. So of course I am here thinking, I know all this already. I got over my big fat head and decided to just go to the lecture.

News Values = The amount of importance a story is given by a media outlet and the amount of attention an audience gives.

News values are:

• Impact
• Audience Identification
• Interesting
• Relates to what is happening around you
• Relevant to your cultural audience 
• Pragmatics
• Ethics
• Facticity
• Practice
• Everyday (24/7)
• Source Influence
• Media PR
• News and PR have a love to hate relationship
• News is incapable without PR

Dr. Redman also went into detail about News Worthiness and what factors control the worth of a story to a particular audience. The Galtung & Ruge 12+ factors were too long to state every factor so everyone car look back to their lecture slides. 

Here is a reduced list of 4 basic values (Judy McGregor 2002):

• Visualness
• Appeal to audiences
• Conflict
• A tried & true news value
• Emotion
• Tied up with human interest
• Celebrification of the journalist

"IF IT BLEEDS IT LEADS."