Jour1111 Lecture Monday 17th September

If It Bleeds It Leads.
This weeks lecture was on News Values. We started by trying to find a definition on the topic, and in doing this Dr Redman asked this question, what would be the top news story, if today's top stories didn't happen? For example if the Muslims riots didn't occur in Sydney and Kate Middleton didn't bear breast, what would the big news channels have reported on? Its a good question to ponder, and I for one began to wonder how corporations then prioritize and "put on hold" major stories to fill these sorts of gaps...This is what today's lecture was all about.

Back to a conventional definitions, in a simplified form, we define News Values as, "The degree of prominence a media outlet gives to a story and the attention that is paid by an audience" This however is one of a myriad of definitions we find to define News Values.

One universal note to make is  News Value is decided under these categories:

Impact-
Audience Identification- Locality, Interesting Viewer Relevance
Pragmatics- Ethics, Current affairs, Practical
Celebrity Status
Emotional Value
Follow Up
Source Influence

An issue we find regarding News Values is that upon having universal categories, News Value prominence in these categorizes can differ immensely. This is in the sense that where one news corporation prioritizes Audience Identification as a leading factor in these news stories, another might consider Celebrity Status to hold more importance and centre news segments around that.

When discussing News Values at work, we see the Journalists favourite tool being implmented, the trusty triangle. Simply the larger segment at the top holds basic precedence over the pointy general hoopla at the bottom.

A man by the name of Prof. Johan Galtung distinguished 12 common factors when detrimining news agendas and inturn News Values, these are:

1. Negativity
2. Proximity
3. Recency
4. Currency
5. Continuity
6. Uniqueness
7. Simplicity
8. Personality
9. Expectedness (Predictability)
10. Elite Nations or People
11. Exclusivity
12. Size


Upon this realization 3 hypotheses where created:

- The Additivity hypothesis that the more factors an event stisfied, the higher the probibilty in that it becomes news
-The complementarity hypothesis that the factors will tend to exclude each other
-The Exclusion hypothesis that events that satisfy none or very few factors will usually not become news



I'll now go back to my beginning sentence, "If It Bleeds, It Leads" I began my reflection with this statement as it is generally sums up the classic belief or leading point behind News Values. This statement suggests that if it bleeds, i.e. death, emotion, shock horror murder accidents etc, it will be of more success than stories centered around happy, materialistic news stories. I'd have to agree with this statement as I converse with my peers about current affairs, very rarely is the first story brought up about supermarket prices, rather it be about catching a criminal or a tragic death. More and more however, we are seeing an increasing trend in "If its local it leads" which suggests, locality and person-ability pulls viewers. By associating viewers with the stories on a personal front people are more inclined, to watch under a pretense that A. This news story will aid in MY safety or protection around my local neighborhood, B. This news story is about MY family or friend or friend of friend, lets see how they go,   or C. I visit supermarkets in this area regularly this story directly influences me and MY shopping experience. The common denominator here is MY. Modern day society want to hear stories of direct relevance and impact to their daily lives. Ultimately the audience are the stakeholders and whatever they desire goes, cause at the end of the day with out an audience all news is, is a group of opinionated people relaying past events like a physics predicting 9/11 three days after the event occurred. completely redundant.