Just In ..... Just out

News Values, Newsworthiness, News Factors, News Criteria, call it what you will it is all about the prominence given to a story and the potential for reaction by the audience. How this flows back and forth pretty much sums up Galtang and Ruge's, 1965 hypotheses, Additivity, Complimentary and Exclusion, based on their 12 News Factors.

Harcup and O'Neill, 2001described these hypotheses as Selection; the more a story fits the News Factors the more likely it is to be newsworthy, Distortion; once the story is selected it just becomes more newsworthy and Replication; the process of Selection and Distortion "take place in all steps in the chain from event to reader."

Is this the way News Values work? Is there a filtering system? Light bulb moment! Why not follow one media outlet and see. So lets take the RSS feeds over a 24 hour period for the ABC Just In, compare them to the ABC Top Stories, and finally see what makes the cut for the 7 o'clock ABC News.

Using Harcup & O'Neill, 2001 News Values of:

1. The Power Elite

2. Celebrity

3.Entertainment

4. Surprise

5. Bad News

6. Good News

7. Magnitude

8. Relevance

9. Follow-up

10. Newspaper Agenda,

what happened and why?

The distribution of the ABC Top Stories based on the above values were;

1. Relevance - 10

2. Bad News - 6

3. Celebrity - 6

4. Follow-up - 5

5.Entertainment - 2

6. Surprise - 2

These results reflect, "If it's local, it leads" and "If it bleeds, it leads" as well as the trend towards a demand for celebrity coverage. Many of the stories dropped were overseas based and bad news stories that did not carry any magnitude.

As far as the ABC TV news coverage, further filtering occurred mainly to make way for local Brisbane and Queensland news, with Australian stories next and then overseas stories that were follow-ups of well known events. Definitely local leads. A sprinkling of bad news and good news stories plus some celebrity news towards the end to leave the audience with a good feel.

It would appear that News Values in the future will be determined less by the media and more by the audience as they pick and choose on-line, not just through media outlets but other sources such as blogs. No doubt studies will be undertaken monitoring the audiences news reading behaviour through their on-line clicks and a whole new set of values will emerge. My bet, it will be embarrassing as to how little audiences care about global and political issues, and how much sensational, tabloid junk news is viewed and thus valued.