News Values from an Audience Perspective 3030450457, 9783030450458

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News Values from an Audience Perspective Edited by Martina Temmerman · Jelle Mast

News Values from an Audience Perspective

Martina Temmerman  •  Jelle Mast Editors

News Values from an Audience Perspective

Editors Martina Temmerman Vrije Universiteit Brussel Brussels, Belgium

Jelle Mast Vrije Universiteit Brussel Brussels, Belgium

ISBN 978-3-030-45045-8    ISBN 978-3-030-45046-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Alex Linch shutterstock This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction: News Values from an Audience Perspective  1 Martina Temmerman and Jelle Mast Part I The Different Connections Between News Values and the Audience  15 2 The Bad News and the Good News About News 17 Tony Harcup 3 News Values in Audience-Oriented Journalism: Criteria, Angles, and Cues of Newsworthiness in the (Digital) Media Context 37 Steve Paulussen and Peter Van Aelst 4 News Values and Topics: A 15-Nation News Consumer Perspective 57 Jeffrey S. Wilkinson, August E. Grant, Yicheng Zhu, and Diane Guerrazzi

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Part II News Values, Audience Metrics and Shareability  79 5 Analysing News Values in the Age of Analytics 81 Edson C. Tandoc Jr, Lydia Cheng, and Julian Maitra 6 Raising Clickworthiness: Effects of Foregrounding News Values in Online Newspaper Headlines 95 Luuk Lagerwerf and Charlotte G. Govaert 7 Facebook Status Messages as Seductive and Engaging Headlines: Interviews with Social Media News Editors121 Michaël Opgenhaffen Part III News Values for Audiences on Local and Social Media 139 8 “We Would Never Have Made That Story”: How Public-­Powered Stories Challenge Local Journalists’ Ideas of Newsworthiness141 Jan Boesman, Irene Costera Meijer, and Merel Kuipers 9 From Newsworthiness to Shareworthiness: Understanding Local News Value Judgements Through an Ethnographic Study of Hyperlocal Media Facebook Page Audiences165 Jerome Turner Index187

Notes on Contributors

Jan Boesman  is Lecturer in Media Sociology at the University of Leuven, Belgium. After being a sports writer for a few years, and obtaining a PhD on production aspects of journalistic framing (University of Leuven, 2017), he broadened his interests to include participatory journalism and audience engagement. Lydia  Cheng is an MA candidate at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her thesis explores the impact of digitalisation on women’s magazines in Singapore. Irene  Costera  Meijer  is Professor of Journalism Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and a world-leading journalism and media scholar. Her research focuses on what audiences value about journalism, their doubts, avoidance and feelings of mistrust. Charlotte G. Govaert  teaches journalism at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Before obtaining a PhD from the University of Aberdeen, she worked as a journalist for public television in the Netherlands. August  E.  Grant  is J.  Rion McKissick Professor of Journalism at the University of South Carolina (USC), USA, and the director of the USC Center for Teaching Excellence. Grant is a technology futurist who has edited the Communication Technology Update and Fundamentals since 1992 and is a co-author of Principles of Convergent Journalism. In addition to exploring new communication technologies, Grant’s research explores media audience behaviour, convergent journalism, radio and vii

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t­ elevision broadcasting and applications of network analysis to the study of media organisations and audiences. Diane Guerrazzi  is Professor of Journalism at San José State University, USA, with 30 years of experience in television news. She has trained journalists in Afghanistan and Georgia, and has directed journalism academies in India, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. She has been appointed as the 2021–2022 resident director for California State University International Programs in Florence, Italy. Tony Harcup  teaches journalism at the University of Sheffield, UK, having previously worked as a journalist within mainstream and alternative media. His books include the Oxford Dictionary of Journalism (2014), Journalism: Principles and Practice (2015) and What’s the Point of News? (2020). Merel  Kuipers  is a former journalism student at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She graduated on a thesis on public-­oriented journalism with regional broadcasters in the Netherlands. Luuk Lagerwerf  is Associate Professor of Language and Communication at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD from Tilburg University and worked as Assistant Professor of Communication Science at Twente University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research topics include news, advertising and visual communication. Julian  Maitra is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Media and Communications Management, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His thesis analyses how algorithmically driven technologies transform journalistic authorship. Jelle  Mast is Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. He is the head of the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies and current chair of the Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association. His research is typically located at the intersection of visual communication, journalism practice and professional ethics. Michaël Opgenhaffen  is Associate Professor at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. He is the director of the Master’s in Journalism programme at the KU Leuven, and a visiting professor at the University of

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Leiden, the Netherlands. His research focuses on the production and consumption of social media news. Steve Paulussen  is Associate Professor of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and is a member of the research group ‘Media, Policy & Culture’ (MPC). His research focuses on different aspects of digital journalism. He has written widely on participatory journalism, gatekeeping, innovations in news media and the role of technology in news work. Edson C. Tandoc Jr  received his PhD from the University of Missouri, USA, and is an associate professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on the sociology of message construction in the context of digital journalism. Martina  Temmerman is Associate Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She is the director of the Master’s in Journalism programme in the Department of Applied Linguistics, where she teaches linguistic discourse analysis and journalistic writing classes. Her research focuses on the linguistic analysis of journalistic texts. Jerome Turner  is Lecturer at the Birmingham City University’s School of Media, UK, and is involved in a variety of research projects at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. His research interests include hyperlocal media, journalism, online culture and audience studies. Peter  Van  Aelst is Full Professor of Political Communication at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and is a member of the research group ‘Media, Movements and Politics’ (www.m2p.be). His research focuses on the relationship between media and politics in the digital era. He has written widely on political news and the growing influence of social media in political life and journalism. Jeffrey  S.  Wilkinson is Associate Professor of Journalism at Florida A&M University, USA, with expertise in International News and Media Technology. He has over 25 years of experience in higher education as an administrator and a faculty member in the USA and China, and is a lead author of Principles of Convergent Journalism. He has more than 13  years of teaching and researching experience in China’s Pearl Delta

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Region, first as a faculty member in Hong Kong, then as an administrator building degree programmes in Zhuhai. Yicheng  Zhu is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. His research interests include effects of political communication at national and transnational levels. Other areas of teaching and scholarship include communication technology, public relations and public diplomacy.

List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 9.1

Frequencies of six news values, language intensity and forward referencing in NRC headlines (n = 3826)111 310 Visitor Posts posted by audience members of the Wolverhampton WV11 Facebook Page, categorised by story type (n = 310)178

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 6.1

Mean number of stories by topic 66 Mean number of stories by topic by country 67 Descriptive statistics for story total by country 68 Importance of traditional news values among all respondents 69 Mean importance of news values by country 70 Correlations between hours using internet to get news and news values 71 Correlations between hours using internet to get news and news topics 71 B-coefficients, standard errors, β-values and significance levels of a linear regression of CTR differential scores on differential scores of (first model) no. of words, no. of sentences, no. of characters; (second model) forward referencing; (third model) news values and language intensity; Adjusted R2 and ΔR2 for first and subsequent models (total Adjusted R2 = 0.033)112

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: News Values from an Audience Perspective Martina Temmerman and Jelle Mast

Ever since Galtung and Ruge (1965) published their seminal study on news values, the topic has not been out of focus in journalism studies. Harcup and O’Neill added influential contributions in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Harcup and O’Neill 2001; O’Neill and Harcup 2009), which they updated in the second decade (Harcup and O’Neill 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2020) and recently we witnessed a complementary interest from discourse studies and corpus linguistics (e.g. Bednarek and Caple 2017). News values play an important role in the news selection process. Studies in journalism have constantly been revisiting and redefining the criteria for news selection, but they mostly start either from the point of view of the journalist or from the analysis of the journalistic texts and/or visuals delivered. However, in the academic thinking about journalism, an audience turn (after the linguistic turn and the narrative turn) has taken place. User-based approaches to journalism have been introduced (see among others Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2016), focusing on

M. Temmerman (*) • J. Mast Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Temmerman, J. Mast (eds.), News Values from an Audience Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5_1

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production (e.g. investigating the involvement of the audience in the journalistic creation process) as well as on consumption (e.g. measuring clicking patterns in online news processing). Combining the study of news values with the audience turn offers new perspectives, which we want to explore in this book. The role of the audience in the news selection process, not only as the ‘projected’ news consumer in the heads of journalists and/or editors-in-chief but also as the active and reactive transmitter of news or as the interactive factor in the measurement of online responses and click through rates, has not been studied extensively from a news values angle yet. The impact of the audience on what becomes news and the changes in news values caused by the audience are the core topics of the contributions in this volume. Of course, we have also reflected on the audience we envisaged ourselves with this book volume. We wanted it to be as broad as possible, which is why we have asked our authors to step down from the mere academic register they write in most of the time and to make their insights as accessible as possible, for the non-specialist reader as well. This book is divided in three parts. Part I gives an overview of how thinking about news values has evolved over the last 50  years. Critical notes are added on the applicability of news value theory and on the importance of a proper news selection for a vital civil society. Additionally, in order to put news values in a broader, global perspective, news consumers’ preferences and behaviour are discussed based on a survey conducted in 15 countries worldwide. Tony Harcup, one of the ‘founding parents’ of the study of news values, has written Chap. 2 for this volume. He offers a very personal account of how his conceptions of news and the audience have evolved since the 1960s until now. In his career, he has always approached news values from the perspective of the journalist or the scholar. Together with Deirdre O’Neill, he published influential papers on the forces that determine what becomes news (Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2009, 2020). He now switches his viewpoint to that of a member of the news audience (who has unavoidably at the same time processed numerous empirical studies of the factors that determine what is news), who wants to add some critical thinking about what news could be. His point is that news helps in creating a potential for the audience to become active citizens and that it is therefore primordial to always have the audience in mind when working as a journalist. He draws on the notion of ‘imaginative empathy’ (Berger 1975) to argue that, if news

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stories appeal to this sentiment, the audience will develop a capacity of solidarity and overcome immature reflexes like interpreting the world in terms of us-them oppositions. This does not mean that news stories should be tear-jerking and emotional but that journalists should be able to sketch balanced representations by ‘listening actively’ (Robinson 2011) to the people involved. Harcup goes on to say that active listening creates a dialogic relationship between journalists and their audience(s). Enhancing the imaginative empathy simultaneously reduces stereotyping and distortion and creates ‘emotional proximization’ (Kopytowska 2015). After about 40 years of thinking about journalism, Harcup feels entitled to define what ‘good journalism’ is and for him, trying to fight apathy and to inspire the audience to take action is key to this definition. Recognising and recording the agency of the audience means that journalists provide enough context so that relations and proportions become clear; that they ask questions about the structural forces in society and that they reflect on how the news affects the bulk of the population, rather than the ‘Great Men or Women’. For Harcup, the agency of the audience still only becomes part of the news production process through the agency of the journalist. For other authors, the agency of the audience is a more independent force, which can influence and steer the production and distribution of news in its own right. This is explained in the next chapter. Chapter 3 is a theoretical one, in which Steve Paulussen and Peter Van Aelst give an account of the study of news values since Galtung and Ruge (1965) till the present day and discuss the question which research topics should be addressed and which methods should be used to establish the relationship between news values and the audience. This chapter provides the bigger scope for the central topic of this volume. It tries to finetune the concept of news values, which is used by many different authors in many different ways and elaborates on the changes brought about by digital journalism and more specifically on the way audience analytics affect the construction of news(worthiness). According to Paulussen and Van Aelst, there are two models of thinking about news values and three approaches to study them: on the one hand there is the causal model that considers events and utterances to possess inherent qualities or ‘news factors’ (Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006) which are then selected by journalists on the basis of a consensus about the significance of these qualities. It is this consensus that determines the news

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value. The functional model on the other hand is routine-related and considers news values to be the outcome of the pragmatics of journalistic production routines. Both models can be found in studies on the gatekeeping or selection approach to news values, which try to answer the question why certain topics are selected for the news and others are not. Another possible approach is the discursive approach. All studies in this domain adhere to the functional model and focus on how the news is presented, which angles and frames are applied and to which distortions of the facts these choices can lead. News values in this approach can be seen as the ‘pegs’ to hang the news on. A third approach is the replication approach, which is interested in the way the representation of the news is echoed in society and the public domain. This approach applies the causal model and considers news values to be cognitive clues that attract people’s attention. Especially in an age of information abundance, cognitive clues are important structuring devices. With the advent of digital and social media, direct and indirect influences of the audience on the gatekeeping process and on the construction of news and newsworthiness have become more visible and important. While the presence of the audience in the back of journalists’ minds was already recognised in the routine-related functional model, the independent role of news consumers as secondary gatekeepers is now a new domain of study. By clicking, liking, sharing and commenting, the audience influences the production and distribution of news and these processes deserve scholarly attention. These new evolutions will be discussed in depth in Chap. 5. Also, future research on news values might focus on the cognitive cues and try to find out which news values the audience applies for making a selection from the constant stream of information, for sharing this information and for assessing it. Taken one step further, these news cues could be detected automatically and news bots and social media algorithms could produce news tailored to the wishes of the audience. When thinking about the future of journalism, Paulussen and Van Aelst plead in favour of a thorough examination of what kind of news values should be reproduced in automated journalism and what kind of news gatekeepers we want machines to be. For them, audience-oriented journalism should not be equated to commercial or market-driven journalism and should not reduce audiences to their consumer role.

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Chapter 4 puts the topic of news values and the audience in a global perspective. Jeffrey Wilkinson, August Grant, Yicheng Zhu and Diane Guerrazzi point out that news values have been studied extensively by Western researchers, but that relatively little attention has been paid to news consumers’ behaviour around the world. The authors confirm what was contended in the previous chapter, that is there has been a transformation of news consumers from passive receivers to active seekers and contributors and they emphasise that it is important to see that the disruptive nature of the ongoing information revolution is a global phenomenon. Still, what is perceived as news values may be different around the world. For too long, first-world nations have dominated the global news, but the diffusion of mobile broadband media technologies has had a democratisation effect on news consumption. Local news for local-audience media systems have been established in many countries and cultures. That is why the authors surveyed news consumers in 15 countries, geographically and culturally spread around the globe, and asked them about their conceptions of news. Both news topics (inherent news qualities of events or ‘news factors’ as they were called in Chap. 3) and news values as cognitive clues with varying salience (see also Chap. 3) were questioned. News topics and news values were then related to the internet use in the countries under study. The authors found that there were vast differences in perceptions of news and news values in the different countries. Inherent news qualities and salience were tied to different topics in every country, depending on specific events happening at the time of the survey. However, some common ground was found for values like ‘proximity’ and ‘unexpectedness’. These appear to be the most universal values, raising the attention of audiences in all cultures. This study shows that researchers should be careful in applying the results of news studies from one country to another, but that generally, inherent news factors are more determining for the perceived news value than discursive techniques which only give shape to the formal representation of the events. Part II of this book contains three contributions on news professionals’ strategies and their views of audiences. This part tackles the topic of measuring the audience responses, explaining how audience response is used as a news value in itself by journalists but also how online editors change headlines based on measurements of the audience’s appreciation or how algorithms decide what is the most important news based on the

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audience’s clicking behaviour. ‘Clickworthiness’ and ‘shareability’ are central concepts here. In Chap. 5, Edson Tandoc Jr., Lydia Cheng and Julian Maitra elaborate on the ideas put forward in Chap. 3, that is the power dynamics between journalists and news audiences have changed, facilitated by changes in information and communication technologies. The authors confirm that the gatekeeping processes have been altered fundamentally as more and more non-journalists are taking part in journalistic processes with the advent of digital media. But audience measurement systems have changed as well. News organisations have long tracked their audiences but they were dependent on limited surveying methods. Now, with web analytics, audience data (from a much larger segment than before) is collected automatically, and it can be analysed, synthetised and reported in real time. As they are under pressure by competition and declining sales figures, many newsrooms resort to web analytics as a tool that can help them understand and grow their audience and they adapt their news content according to the audience behaviour. This catering to the wishes of the audience has also led news factors and news values to change. Attracting more traffic or views on the website is now a news factor in itself. In this respect, the authors think it is significant that Harcup and O’Neill (2017) have added ‘shareability’ to their list of news values. The notion of shareability will be further explored in Chaps. 8 and 9. Web analytics are used to decide which stories are important and which will be followed up. The techniques are also applied to see which discursive and cosmetic changes to the presentation of the news generate more traffic and thus increase dissemination. The introduction of web analytics in the newsroom has changed journalistic work fundamentally. Social media managers have entered the newsroom and take part in making editorial decisions. Journalists are now required to actively share their work on third-party platforms, such as social media. They monitor the metrics to gauge the success of their stories and research suggests that they even rely on analytics to cross-check their news judgement. According to the authors, there has always been a field of tension between editorial autonomy and ‘giving the audience what it wants’. Many journalists would not admit it, but the degree of interest the audience would show in a story was often the decisive factor for choosing to publish it. In digital journalism, it has even become harder to ignore the

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audience as web analytics has been routinely embedded in journalistic routines. But news construction remains an important public good. Therefore, web analytics should not be seen as a goal but rather as a helpful tool which when applied wisely, assists professional editors in bringing the best information to the largest possible group. Chapter 6 provides an example of how audience metrics can be used to decide which headline to choose for online news articles. Luuk Lagerwerf and Charlotte Govaert explain that the headline’s function, which traditionally was to grab the readers’ attention allowing them to decide whether to read the article or not, now has evolved to luring the readers into clicking on the article’s link, presented in an array of other headline links. The question newsrooms are interested then in is which factors generate ‘clickworthiness’. The authors synthesise the literature on headlines and explain that headlines are traditionally characterised as short summaries of the news item they precede. However, there are variations to this general rule: some headlines only highlight a detail or foreground a quotation, while others present a riddle that is resolved in the ensuing text. So, apart from the referential function, headlines often have an additional function, which is to attract the reader’s attention and stimulate them to read the article. Thus, from a linguistic point of view, headlines simultaneously have a semantic and a pragmatic function, that is to highlight the article’s meaning and to incite the reader to continue reading. Combining these two functions in one theory, Dor (2003) argues that headlines are designed to optimise the article’s relevance for the reader. For this chapter, the authors investigated which news values (as defined in the vast literature on the topic) work best in headlines for attracting the reader’s attention, to what extent the foregrounding of news values in the headlines results in higher click through rates and how foregrounding news values compares to other techniques that are aimed at increasing ‘clickworthiness’, such as forward referencing (Blom and Hansen 2015) and language intensity. Using Chartbeat, they conducted a quantitative content analysis on an A/B headline test corpus from the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. The results of this analysis show that on the whole, the foregrounding of news values in headlines does not generate a higher click through rate. The only news value that was effective was ‘negativity’. Looking at the linguistic features of the headlines however, the authors found that ‘sentiment words’ (Kuiken et al. 2017) were very good predictors of high click

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through rates. Sentiment words often co-occur with the news value ‘negativity’ but also with the linguistic technique of language intensity. This technique in turn often co-occurs with the news value ‘superlativeness’. The authors suggest that further research should be done in order to finetune the content characteristics of news values and their linguistic features. In Chap. 7, Michaël Opgenhaffen comes back to the topic of headlines (discussed in the previous chapter) and combines this with the topic of news values on social media (also discussed in Chap. 9). He analyses the headlines established news media (newspapers and magazines as well as TV stations) display on social media in order to attract readers to their websites. The news media value both the clicks (enhancing the traffic on their websites) and the engagement that their posts generate (making their sites more visible on social media). The function of headlines on news websites is not only to attract the reader’s attention but also to make the reader curious about the content of the article and incite him or her to click through. These headlines are sometimes called clickbait (Kuiken et al. 2017): they aim at attracting the reader’s attention by hiding crucial information. When news media advertise these headlines on social media, they make sure to select the ones that are most ‘shareable’. This is the most important news value in this context. From his literature review, Opgenhaffen learned that news messages which are most shared on social media are messages which contain pronounced positive or negative news, messages with an ‘awe factor’ and messages in the categories soft/emotional news. Moreover, in order to be able to compete with personal messages on the Facebook news feed, the messages need attractive headlines, formulated in an appealing way. That is why often a caption is added to the title that is taken over from the news site. These captions or status messages (Welbers and Opgenhaffen 2019) can be seen as extra headlines which news organisations use to add an extra layer of information or interpretation and to strengthen ties with the audience. Captions have been studied in content analyses studies before, but here, Opgenhaffen wants to gain more insight into the strategies and arguments of the social media managers of news organisations for using them. For that purpose, he has interviewed social media managers of 22 news organisations in Flanders and The Netherlands. The results show that editors working for the social media channels of established news organisations clearly have a different audience in mind than the editors for the news sites. They try to attract new readers and adapt the captions they

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use to the customs of social media communication. This means that they formulate the captions in a more playful way, sometimes using emotional and non-neutral language. The use of emoji also fits in this strategy. What the interviews show as well is that the new strategies for making headlines ‘shareable’ thus targeting the news value of shareability, often collide with the traditional journalistic values of impartiality and the reputation of the brand name that has to be safeguarded. Opgenhaffen concludes that there is a field of tension between the social media managers and the news site editors and that this is brought about by their different conceptions of news values. Part III elaborates on how the audience can contribute to the creation of news content, often for (hyper)local news media, where people are asked to suggest topics for news stories or on news platforms (e.g. Facebook pages) which are created by non-journalists. In Chap. 8, Jan Boesman, Irene Costera Meijer and Merel Kuipers describe how local journalists reconsider their conceptions of newsworthiness when adapting an audience-driven approach to journalism. The authors argue that local news organisations are losing their audiences even faster than national media. This makes it all the more relevant for journalists to take the needs and desires of the local news user into account. Their study does this by looking specifically at how journalists deal with the preferences of audiences who are invited to participate in the story construction process. From their literature review, the authors conclude that the existing literature actually does not investigate what the audience values but what the audience prefers from what the journalists have pre-selected. Therefore, their study looks at how journalists respond to the preferences of real, participating audiences. To this end, they interviewed journalists from newsrooms who have implemented tools to consult their audiences when selecting and sourcing stories. Over the last years, tools have become available to newsrooms to let audiences participate in the news production. The authors studied three Dutch newsrooms, two of which worked with Hearken, an American company which develops engagement tools for working together with audiences; the third developed their own crowdsourcing strategy. The authors find audience participation of particular interest for local news media as local communities often feel not recognised in national news agendas. They start from the assumption that news values are different for national and local newsrooms, and for legacy and audience-driven

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journalism. Their aim is twofold: they want to study the malleability of journalists’ professional boundaries by focusing on how journalists are challenged by participating audiences in their ideas of what’s newsworthy; second, they also want to study the maintenance of these boundaries by looking at how journalists keep control in this process of open participation. From the analysis of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with journalists working for three local newsrooms in the Netherlands, an observation day in a local newsroom and two editorial meetings, the authors conclude that there are three main news values in which journalists feel challenged: ‘recency’, ‘prominence’ and ‘conflict’; suggestions for stories that are made by the audience are rarely about current events, they seldom have to do with elite actors and they insist more on solutions than on conflicts. The interviews show that local journalists are willing to consider suggestions from the audience and that they often find them inspiring but that they still often cling to their own news values when working out the ideas. The authors conclude that audience-driven journalism does not erode the journalists’ gatekeeping function. Journalists are well aware that news users might have their own agenda for trying to bring topics in the news media circuit. But the input of the audience does inspire journalists to bring stories in a different form or from an angle that is more preferred by the audience, thus bridging the gap between audience preferences and journalists’ news values. Finally, Jerome Turner also focuses on (hyper)local media and he zooms in on the news value ‘shareability’ in Chap. 9. He shifts the focus from mainstream journalism to online and social media. Audiences who are able to source, cite, comment on, endorse and share news stories online have made news media more participatory, and by the nature of digital media, the value of the news for the users can be derived from the way they approach it. Turner reports on two ethnographic audience studies he made of hyperlocal media Facebook pages in the UK. These pages are set up by citizen-editors and the audience of ‘produsers’ participates in them in varying degrees: some just read the content, others ‘like’ the posts or comment on them and still others source or start stories of their own which are then posted into the page’s main flow by the editors. Provided that they have an internet connection, the information in the Facebook pages is easily accessible for all members of the community. Turner combined online

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observation and offline interview with emailed conversations with the users and he also set up a ‘community panel’ Facebook group himself. It is important to keep in mind that the Facebook pages were not the only news source for the users. News consumers are part of a multi-faceted ‘constellation of communicative spaces’ (Dahlgren 2005). The local Facebook pages do not replace the news journalism of local newspapers but perform a specific role. A first observation from the interviews Turner conducted was that the users had more confidence in hyperlocal media from native reporters than in mainstream media because it inspired them with feelings of connection, shared space and relatability. Comparing the news topics on the Facebook pages with those in the hyperlocal print media in the same areas, Turner found that they differed greatly. Banal, everyday stories and upcoming events prevailed on the Facebook pages, whereas the print media, who only appeared once a week and had to weigh newsworthiness against print costs, were much more selective and reported after events had occurred. As for news values, the judgement of valuable content on the Facebook pages can be deducted from the way the users respond to the content. If they take time to read the posts and moreover if they consider them to be shareworthy, this is an indication of the value the content has for them. From an inventory Turner made of the types of stories and which were shared most, he tries to answer the question why the audience finds them interesting enough to share. Among the motivations are: immediacy (social media being faster than any other media), the likelihood that others would be able to relate or provide assistance even if the ‘sharer’ could not (for the ‘appeal’ type of posts) or suspected relevance for people in the sharer’s network. The analysis shows that ‘shareability’ is a concept which deserves further attention in the study of news values. The eight contributions to this book give a 360-degree view of how news values can be approached from an audience perspective. The audience can be a constructed idea in the head of the news workers based on their own experience and circle of acquaintances. These news workers have their own conceptions about the audience’s knowledge and expectations and develop their stories accordingly. It is important to note that ‘what is news’ for the audience has often been described from a Western perspective but that news values are not necessarily universal and may differ over the globe. In some cases, news workers have a very clear idea of the effect they want their stories to have on their audience. For example, they want them

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to become involved citizens who claim participation in societal and political decision-making. One step further in involving the audience is to give them a much more active role in the creation process of the news. This can be done by asking them for topics and what they would like to see/read in their news medium, by using them as sources or by sharing stories members of the audience have worked out themselves. This way of working is common for (hyper)local journalism, but digital and social media make it possible to extend this approach to national and international news media. Another innovation that digital and social media have introduced is in the field of audience metrics: it is now very easy to monitor immediately and on a very large scale what the audience is interested in and what they find worth sharing. Most authors agree that this does not mean that this should be the most important news value and that journalism should evolve in the direction of just ‘giving the people what they want’. This book is a first attempt at bringing in the audience in the study of news values. Even though we have shed light on news values and the audience from many different angles, we are aware of the fact that much more work can be done. Experimental research (e.g. with eye-tracking and think aloud experiments), psychological studies on involvement with the news and societal engagement, ethical considerations on the workings and effects of click bait, news values in the Global South are just a few topics which can be further explored in this context. In an age in which automated algorithms might take over news selection, news values from an audience perspective proves to be a promising domain for further research.

References Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create ‘newsworthiness’. New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, J. (1975, November 27). “Pied piper”, book review of Chris Searle’s Classrooms of resistance. New Society, 497–498. Blom, J.  N., & Hansen, K.  R. (2015). Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics, 76, 87–100. Costera Meijer, I., & Groot Kormelink, T. (2016). Revisiting the audience turn in journalism: How a user-based approach changes the meaning of clicks, transparency, and citizen participation. In B. Franklin & I. I. Scott Eldridge (Eds.), The Routledge companion to digital journalism studies (pp. 345–353). London and New York: Routledge. Dahlgren, P. (2005). ‘The internet, public spheres, and political communication: Dispersion and deliberation. Political Communication, 22, 147–162.

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Dor, D. (2003). On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(5), 695–721. Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crisis in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64–90. Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies, 2(2), 261–280. Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2017). ‘What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18(12), 1470–1488. Kepplinger, H., & Ehmig, S. (2006). Predicting news decisions. An empirical test of the two-component theory of news selection. Communications, 31, 25–43. Kopytowska, M. (2015). Ideology of “here and now”: Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 347–365. Kuiken, J., Schuth, A., Spitters, M., & Marx, M. (2017). Effective headlines of newspaper articles in a digital environment. Digital Journalism, 5(10), 1300–1314. O’Neill, D., & Harcup, T. (2009). News values and selectivity. In K.  Wahl-­ Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), Handbook of journalism studies (pp. 161–174). NJ: Routledge. O’Neill, D., & Harcup, T. (2020). News values and news selection. In K. Wahl-­ Jorgensen & T.  Hanitzsch (Eds.), Handbook of journalism studies (2nd ed., pp. 213–228). NJ: Routledge. Robinson, F. (2011). Stop talking and listen: Discourse ethics and feminist care ethics in international political theory. Millennium, 39(3), 845–860. Welbers, K., & Opgenhaffen, M. (2019). Presenting news on social media: Media logic in the communication style of newspapers on Facebook. Digital Journalism, 7(1), 45–62.

PART I

The Different Connections Between News Values and the Audience

CHAPTER 2

The Bad News and the Good News About News Tony Harcup

In one way or another, I have been working with news for more than 40 years: reporting, subbing, editing, teaching, researching, reading, talking, listening, scrolling and writing. There are advantages and disadvantages associated with that length of experience. One of the advantages is that you get a sense of perspective and a certain scepticism about supposed paradigm shifts and things that are confidently predicted to change journalism—even the world—forever. One of the disadvantages of longevity is that it can lead to assumptions about shared understandings, experiences or cultural references where there may be no such shared understanding. Little can be taken for granted, it seems, and it still comes as a shock and a sadness to be reminded that most of my journalism students have never actually bought a newspaper in their entire lives, and were toddlers when Tony Blair pushed the UK into joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. That does not mean they have no relationship with news; it means that their relationship is likely to be different, both from what mine was and

T. Harcup (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 M. Temmerman, J. Mast (eds.), News Values from an Audience Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5_2

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from what mine is. I have much to learn from them just as I hope they have something to learn from me. One thing my four decades of working in journalism has not done is put me off the news. I still find it endlessly fascinating even though it can also be endlessly frustrating. Even the blandest radio news bulletin or the lowest quality newspaper is likely to leave me better informed and sometimes more angry and other times more uplifted, sometimes more amused and sometimes more curious, than I was before. That is always interesting.

News as a Lived Experience I love and value the news. I just think it could be better, more often than it is. To help explore this point, the chapter will draw on some of my own experiences, as a member of the audience as well as a participant and as a producer, of news as a lived experience. These will be discussed along with relevant insights from journalism studies and beyond in an effort to pull such thoughts together in what is intended to be a forward-looking rather than nostalgic consideration of the bad news and the good news about news. In fact, my involvement with news really began when I was a child, rather more than 40 years ago. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was a member of the news audience. In those days we did not have the ‘ambient’ news (Hermida 2010) of today’s digital world, always on, but we did have news delivered at regular intervals. Literally delivered in the form of a daily newspaper put through our letterbox early every morning (the Daily Mail and Sunday Express in our case). And the teatime television news was always appointment viewing for my mum and dad. This meant that, without making any sort of conscious choice, I grew up being exposed to the big news stories of the day. One of the first such stories of which I was aware was when I was a little boy and a ‘newsflash’ interrupted the early evening game show we were watching on TV: Take Your Pick. That was 22 November 1963. As soon as that light-hearted programme was replaced by the serious tones of a newsreader, my sister immediately said to the rest of us: ‘The Queen’s dead’. She understood something of news values even though she would never have heard the phrase; she knew they would not interrupt popular family viewing for any run-of-the-mill story. My sister guessed wrong about the high-profile person involved but she was right about the degree of magnitude and the fact that it was likely to be bad news: President

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Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas, Texas, and had been rushed to hospital. Not long before that, I now know, the scholars Johan Galtung and Marie Ruge had noted that something quite similar would have made a story with pre-eminent value in the world of news, as Galtung and another collaborator later recalled: Writing in 1961 the perfect news item would have been for Khrushchev and Kennedy to kill each other during the Vienna summit meeting that year. The item would have scored high on all dimensions: top elite countries; top elite people; a highly personal relation between specific individuals; a rather negative event. (Galtung and Vincent 1992: 33)

Such an event involving the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States would certainly have been a shocking development, even during the Cold War. It would have been very bad news and (therefore?) a very good news story. The actual killing of President Kennedy—his death was announced a few hours after the initial newsflash—was similarly a great news story with huge worldwide interest and resonance. But it did not really have that big an impact on little me, sitting there in my family home in faraway London. Nor did the—arguably even more shocking—killing of the alleged assassin in full view of close-up TV cameras just a few days later. I was very young and these events occurred in a country that I ‘knew’ only via TV shows. Such news seemed to have nothing to do with me. Even headlines from closer to home resonated little with me as a child, whether they were ‘great’ train robberies, cop-killers on the run or the disgrace of a government minister who lost his job because of lying about ‘a good time girl’, whatever one of those might have been. It mostly seemed to be just a stream of names of people, places or events that would appear fleetingly in the news only to disappear and be replaced by others, leaving little trace or emotional impact behind them. That was until one day in 1966.

‘Imaginative Empathy’ and the News On 21 October of that year there was Aberfan: a place that became a real-­ life horror story. That was the first news story that really got to me. I can remember coming home from junior school and finding out that children

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of a similar age to me had gone to their own school that day but they never came home because rain had caused a giant and dangerous slag heap to engulf the Pantglas junior school in the South Wales village of Aberfan. I had never been to Wales or seen a coal mine nor really knew what a slag heap was, but I knew that 116 little children had died, plus 28 of their teachers and other adults (Jackson 2016). I didn’t just know it, I felt it. I could relate to that news story which dominated the headlines for days, illustrated with TV footage and newspaper still photographs that brought home the ‘emotional catastrophe’ of the event (Evans 1997 [1978]: 219). I have since spoken to others of my generation who felt a similar impact. News stories about Aberfan enabled us to feel empathy for those involved, to put ourselves in their shoes and make a connection between those children in the news and our own schools, our own families, our own communities, our own lives. Empathy is, I feel, an important quality in life and in journalism. Perhaps it is something that is not discussed enough in journalism textbooks or on journalism training courses. As the writer, thinker and art critic John Berger (1975) once put it, writing about what he termed ‘imaginative empathy’: ‘All imagination begins with the ability to identify with the experience of others, who are like yourself but different’. Berger indicated that imaginative empathy can help blur the boundaries between them and us, whoever they and we may be. As it happens, he wrote these words in a review of a book of children’s poems that had been edited by one of the teachers at my own school. That teacher, Chris Searle, was particularly gifted at facilitating empathy. He created space for it in the curriculum, and news stories were one of the tools he used. Searle would collect newspaper cuttings and photographs, often from the contemporary national or local press but sometimes from historical alternative media such as Lansbury’s Labour Weekly or the Workers’ Dreadnought, archives of which he would access in the local history library and copy out by hand (as this was at a time before photocopiers were common). He would bring such material into the classroom and ask children to put themselves in the shoes of someone in those stories, whether they be children in Aberfan or in the floods in even more distant Pakistan, a soldier in a trench or a homeless person on a local street. Such an approach encouraged both curiosity about, and empathy with, the ‘ordinary people’ involved in such events.

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Berger explained this critical pedagogy in the following way, which I feel has some resonance with the approach of critical (or ‘alternative’) journalism: His pupils are working class. Around the school the docks are being closed down, social services are being cut, unemployment is increasing and the poverty of the permitted choices is becoming more and more obvious. … All this outside the classroom. … Searle allows them to feel and think about what is happening outside the classroom and what is likely to happen next— given who they are. … A few of the poems and stories display impressive literary talent. But the talent which most of them display is of another kind. The talent, the faculty, of imaginative empathy. They prove Adam Smith and Ricardo and Mill wrong: egoism is not the first motive of man. Solidarity is deeper and more natural. (Berger 1975)

Some of the kids’ poems had initially been published in a booklet called Stepney Words and Searle was sacked as a result because the poems were ‘too gloomy’ for the tastes of the school governors (Harcup 2009; Searle 1998). The whole thing was quite an educational experience. It also has some relevance to journalism, partly because the story of the teacher who lost his job because of pupils’ poetry itself became a big news story, thanks to us, and partly because empathy can be one of the more positive audience responses to the news. The kind of imaginative empathy celebrated by Berger is not (simply) a question of feeling sorry for people who find themselves in helpless predicaments. It is something more than that. If we apply it to the news, it is not about journalists emoting all over their stories, in the way ridiculed by the Bosnian soldier who once chided the veteran BBC journalist Martin Bell with the words: ‘There you go again, bleeding all over your typewriter’ (Bell 1998: 22). Berger’s imaginative empathy resonates with good journalism in that it suggests the possibility, at least, of a feeling of social solidarity among people. It can go beyond curiosity about people’s lives towards an effort to understand different peoples’ perspectives as well as their experiences. ‘To imagine the situations of others we must be able to put ourselves in their shoes without being overtaken by our own interest in the issue’, as Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (2019: 78–79) puts it, adding that journalism can either help or hinder this process because ‘there is a crucial link between representation and emotion/action or, conversely, ­ indifference/

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non-action’. Yet, even when news reporters frame their subjects’ experiences in an overtly emotional way, there is no guarantee of how the audience will receive such stories: The spectator can accept the proposal made to him, be indignant at the sight of children in tears being herded by armed soldiers; be moved by the efforts of this nurse whose hands are held out to someone who is starving; or feel the black beauty of despair at the execution of the absolute rebel proudly draped in his crime. He can also reject the proposal or return it. (Boltanski 1999: 149)

There may be no guarantees, then, but empathy seems more likely to be engendered by those news stories that result from journalists who have learned how to listen to the people involved. That means to really listen (Wasserman 2013); the sort of active listening that is sometimes referred to as forming part of a feminist ethics of care (Robinson 2011). ‘Listening in this sense means not just hearing the words that are spoken’, explains Fiona Robinson (2011: 847): ‘but being attentive to and understanding the concerns, needs and aims of others in the dialogue’.

News and ‘the Landscape Normality’

of Overwhelming

Of course, the imaginative empathy required of a news reporter, or indeed of members of the news audience, may not necessarily be the same as that expected of the poet or the artist. But perhaps we can learn something from them. From the poet WH Auden, for example, whose relevance to journalism was brought to my attention by Martin Wainwright (2001, 2003, 2012), the former northern editor of the Guardian who has repeatedly returned to this theme in his columns and in talks to journalism students, schoolchildren, women’s institutes and anyone else who will listen. On such occasions Wainwright likes to discuss Auden’s (1938) poem Musee des Beaux Arts—which refers to a number of paintings, most notably Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s (circa 1562) The Fall of Icarus—in relation to the news industry. For those not familiar with that particular painting, all you can see of Icarus are his legs sticking out of the sea, while everyone else carries on with their daily lives. For Wainwright (2001):

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Bruegel immortalised something awful and abnormal—a boy plunging from the sky as his home-made wings melted in the sun—but set it firmly in the landscape of overwhelming normality: a farmer ploughing a field, a merchant ship plying the sea. WH Auden wrote a marvellous poem about this painting, underlining how extraordinary events take place in the context of almost everyone else in the world ‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. If we could find a way to emphasise that, every time sky-­ high headlines describe a paedophile attack or pensioner’s murder, there’d be a lot less unnecessary fear and panic-driven legislation.

This lesson ‘that drama and news take place in a corner of a vastly greater canvas of normality and well-being’ should, suggested Wainwright (2012), ‘be the first and last item on every media training course’. A second lesson, ‘that suffering, misery and drama should not be ignored on that account, does not need teaching to the modern media’ (Wainwright 2012). Those are indeed useful lessons, but I would extend them to say that Bruegel and Auden between them encourage us to look at the big picture as well as the small details, but that the small details do matter; and we need to ensure we pay sufficient attention to what is going on in the corners, in the margins. Including, crucially for journalism, on the margins of society. I got the chance to examine both the pig picture and the small details up close when visiting the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique while in Brussels for the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies What’s (the) News? conference in December 2018. Studying the painting in person allows for greater observation of details such as the feather floating on the water, the blinkers on the horse, the colours and the angles at which all the heads are turned away from the supposed ‘action’. What a contrast to Rubens’ painting of Icarus in the same art gallery, which is essentially a dramatic close-up of the main character in action, at the point of beginning to fall from the sky: Rubens’ painting is powerful too as it gives us the equivalent of a celebrity news item, albeit a hard-hitting one full of drama and downfall. Bruegel’s is different, giving us mostly the context; a man ploughing a field in the latter painting ‘may have heard the splash’, as Auden (1938) writes, ‘but for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone’. Might the poet also, indirectly, be addressing us, the fleeting visitor in the gallery and, by implication, the casual viewer of tragic news? One other little thing I noticed in the margins was a small caption on the wall next to the painting, reading: ‘Peter Bruegel I?’ The question

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mark indicates that there is now some doubt as to whether the ‘old master’ actually painted that particular picture at all. I must admit that I quite like the uncertainty about that, and it too seems to me to have some resonance with journalism, whereby we aim for ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’ (Bernstein 1992: 24), in full knowledge that the best obtainable version may change as we learn more or unlearn what we once thought we knew. It also shows the benefit of going to a scene to observe for yourself, taking the time to notice even the small things; another lesson that might usefully be taught on journalism training courses.

‘What’s the Point of This Story?’ I never went on a journalism course. Not a formal one, anyway. I got into journalism by turning up and offering to help out at the local alternative newspaper that I used to read, Leeds Other Paper; I learned the job by doing it in a collective and collaborative environment that was both supportive and challenging (Harcup 2013). We had editorial meetings where everyone would read every proposed contribution and then, sometimes after drink had been taken, we would discuss the merits or otherwise of each story. It was supportive because it was not hierarchical, competitive or commercial. It was a form of do-it-yourself media run co-operatively in the service of the community; in the service of those sections of the community that noticed our existence, anyway. We were part of an ‘alternative public sphere’ (Atton 2002: 35), as none of us called it at the time. It was also challenging because everything was up for discussion. Not just how the story had been reported, who had been quoted, the way it had been framed and which words were used, but why it was worth reporting at all, what the very point of the story was. To ask, ‘What’s the point of this story?’ rather implies that every story ought to have a point. What sort of point? It was the 1970s and I was working on an alternative paper created by what with hindsight might be thought of as the 1968 generation, so the point was simple: to change the world for the better. It was once put like this in an internal discussion document about the purpose of news (yes, we had internal discussion documents about the purpose of news), in which one of the paper’s founders wrote: politically, a good story for me is one that reinforces the ability of the mass of people to do things for themselves and decreases their reliance on others (especially in work and in the community). Conversely, a bad story is one

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that does the opposite of this. It’s a very general and unsatisfactory criterion in many respects but it does home in on the basic belief in people having power over their own lives. (From Views on the news, undated but produced at some point in the 1980s; see Harcup 2013: 171–175)

This was a concept of news reporting that was built upon recognising and recording the ‘agency’ of working class people.

The Bad News News stories are not always like that, of course, certainly not in mainstream commercial media. We knew we were on the margins and that dominant news values often seemed quite different from ours; indeed, the very existence of an alternative press was in effect a critique of dominant news values. Some of the shortcomings of news are today blamed on a shortage of staff and a lack of investment, combined with an existential crisis in much of the news industry prompted by the growth of online and social media. Those are all major issues. But they are not the whole picture. It can be useful to take a step back and remind ourselves that the aforementioned alternative critique of news appeared at a time of relatively high staffing, serious investment and massive reach of the mainstream news industry in comparison to the sorry state of such media today. Yet much of the news produced at the time was still found wanting in many ways. Why? Because staffing and investment are important but they are not the full story: • The bad news about so much news then and now is that it can lack the context and the keeping of things in proportion that are required to make sense of the world; • News can be dispiriting and scary, demotivating people rather than encouraging agency or active citizenship; • The news can ask too few questions about structural forces in society; • And it too often ignores the experiences and perspectives of those at the bottom, or at the margins, in favour of covering politics as a kind of game of elites, so-called Great Men (and occasionally women), focusing on who’s up and who’s down rather than how the bulk of the population might be affected.

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Those are some of the things that Galtung and Ruge (1965) found to be wrong with news more than half a century ago when they conducted what is generally referred to as their seminal study of news factors. Deirdre O’Neill and I have been among those who have since attempted to update their taxonomy of news (Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2009, 2020), but increasingly my own thoughts have been turning from what news is to what news could be (Harcup 2020).

The Good News Berger’s argument about empathy (above) can inform our thinking about news because news stories—certainly those that are not focused on elites or celebrities—are usually about people who are like ourselves but different. Like ourselves in some ways and different in others, but different does not equal worthless. Interestingly, in this light, Monika Kopytowska’s (2015) study of CNN news stories about the Horn of Africa discusses the tension between coverage that provokes ‘an emotional connection, evoking empathy with distant suffering’ (p. 351) and that which reduces the complexities of events and people by a process of often inadvertent ‘stereotypization and distortion’ (p. 359). Kopytowska (2015: 360) refers to news coverage in such circumstances as facilitating a form of ‘emotional proximization’, meaning that ‘the closer something is in time and space, the more likely it is to evoke an emotional reaction, either in positive or negative sense’, which can be encouraged by journalistic techniques such as reporters overseas telling viewers directly what is happening ‘here’ and ‘now’, and by editing of footage to emphasise zooming in and close-ups. Emotional proximation is perhaps what was going on in 2015 when a photograph of the dead body of Syrian three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach seemed to arouse a more empathetic international response to refugees—for about a fortnight. The news agency photographer Nilufer Demir, whose pictures of the dead boy resonated around the world, explained her own emotional response to CNN: There was nothing left to do for him. There was nothing left to bring him back to life. … There was nothing to do except take his photograph … and that is exactly what I did. I thought, ‘This is the only way I can express the scream of his silent body’. … I didn’t think it would bring this much attention when I was taking the photograph. However, with the pain I felt when I saw Aylan, the only thing on my mind was to pass along this to the public.

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I didn’t think anything else. I just wanted to show their tragedy. (Nilufer Demir, quoted in Griggs 2015)

As John Berger wrote about such news photographs in the context of the Vietnam war: They bring us up short. The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting. We are seized by them. (I am aware that there are people who pass them over, but about them there is nothing to say.) As we look at them, the moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us. We are filled with either despair or indignation. Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation demands action. (Berger 1991 [1980]: 42; emphasis in original)

If Berger has something to say to us about news then so, indirectly, do Bruegel and Auden, who urge us to think about the importance of seeing what is going on in the whole picture: the normal as well as the abnormal, the routine as well as the surprising. And of not forgetting about the people in the margins. Seeking out people on the margins, those at the bottom of the pile, were among the things we tried to do when producing news in the alternative media when I started out as a journalist, and I am pleased to see that a similar ethos informs the practice of some journalists today, in both mainstream and alternative media. Running more or less simultaneously with the December 2018 What’s (the) News? conference in Brussels was the latest of the annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences, that one in Katowice, Poland, and during downtime at my event I would tune in to watch coverage from Katowice on Democracy Now!, the long-running alternative media outlet from the United States. That was the first time I saw climate emergency activist Greta Thunberg, then aged 15, who had travelled to Poland (by electric car) to urge more urgent action to tackle climate change, ‘because tomorrow it might be too late’. Thunberg explained that she had been inspired to launch her schoolkids’ strike over climate issues after seeing news of school students in Parkland, Florida, striking for gun control after yet another school shooting in the United States. She told Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodman: ‘And then someone I knew said, “What if children did that for the climate?” And then, I thought that that was a good idea, that maybe it would make a difference’ (Democracy Now! 2018a). So, hearing news of people like her but different inspired Greta

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Thunberg to take action, since when news of her actions has spread far beyond alternative media and has inspired possibly millions of others to take action, whether that be organising school strikes, voting green, abandoning plane travel or countless other steps large or small, individual or collective, in many countries across the world. Typically, Democracy Now! has covered the UN events over the years by letting us hear not so much from the official conference delegates within and more of the voices of those outside, protesting on the streets, who are often from those parts of the Global South that are at the most immediate risk from climate change (Goodman 2017: 221). Sometimes, however, they do turn their attention to the men in suits within, as when an increasingly breathless Goodman spent several minutes chasing one of President Donald Trump’s advisers through the Katowice conference venue, along crowded corridors and up several sets of stairs, all the time firing questions at her discombobulated quarry (Democracy Now! 2018b). Although we did not get answers to those specific questions, it was informative in a broader sense. It was an exercise in speaking truth to power—literally. And it should not go unremarked that, from my perspective as a member of the news audience, it was also very funny.

An Ethical Approach to Listening Amy Goodman (2017: 348) is fond of saying that it is the job of journalists to ‘go where the silence is’. Because it probably is not really silence; it may just be that nobody much is listening. Many of us who have worked in and around journalism talk about the possibility, even the responsibility, of giving voice to the voiceless; feminist scholarship has been particularly useful in going beyond such rhetoric to point out that having a voice is only half the process required for communication. Voices need to be heard. Not just heard but listened to. This involves what is sometimes referred to as an ethical approach to listening, and that is linked to the aforementioned concept of caring (Robinson 2011; Wasserman 2013). It is not about listening to the loudest voices on social media, it is about developing more dialogic relationships, which may require a sustained period of time to nurture and deepen, and therefore militates against superficial ‘churnalism’ and ‘parachute journalism’ alike (Harcup 2014: 53, 227). This is certainly not easy in understaffed newsrooms, but where possible the careful groundwork put in over months and years of building trust between journalists and their sources, even sometimes blurring the

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distinction between the two, can result in some very powerful stories being told. As Herman Wasserman (2013: 79) has put it, in an African context, an ethic of listening is about journalists treating people with dignity in a fundamental sense by ‘taking their stories seriously’ even if they are not the most obviously sexy or clickable stories of the day: ‘Journalists who listen can facilitate a politics from the ground up’. These are valuable insights into what is so good about the best news, and they can help us to recognise what is missing from too many news stories. Thinking about this more in recent years has led me further into engagement with feminist scholarship and consideration of what it might have to say about the news (Harcup 2020). In particular I have found myself returning to an article from 1998 by Meenakshi Gigi Durham in which she talked about the possibility of applying what has been described as ‘feminist standpoint epistemology’ to journalism. Durham (1998: 135) argues that standpoint epistemology could inform an alternative model of journalistic praxis with the potential to become ‘a radical intervention to subvert from within the hegemonies in current news practice’. How? It would require journalists to ‘rethink themselves and their craft from the position of marginalized Others, thus uncovering unconscious ethnocentric, sexist, racist, and heterosexist biases that distort news production as it is governed by the dominant news paradigm’ (p. 132). To which I would add class biases too, which Durham also mentions (p. 136). For Durham (1998: 138), rethinking things from the position of the marginalised is not just the usual good advice of trying to get both sides of a story, as a minimum requirement, or ideally an even wider range of voices. Rather, it entails producing journalism that in effect goes out of its way to privilege the standpoint of the most oppressed in any particular situation, meaning that ‘the truth claims of the socially marginalized would be centred and foregrounded’ (Durham 1998: 138; my emphasis).

Reporting News from the Bottom Up Those of us involved in producing alternative media such as Leeds Other Paper were trying to do precisely that, even though we may not have theorised it specifically as feminist standpoint epistemology. We tended to call it reporting from below. Or even just reporting. It does not have to be a preserve of alternative journalism. Reporters such as Lindsey Hilsum at

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Channel 4 News in the UK,1 for example, routinely cover international conflicts by seeking out the voices and perspectives of those on the ground, often women, rather than relying on amplifying the views of men with guns. She even occasionally gets to report a good news story, such as the outbreak of peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea (Hilsum 2018). Durham’s (1998: 135) wish for more journalists to ‘subvert from within the hegemonic current news practice’ echoes of some of the lesser quoted parts of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) original work in which they sought to encourage journalists to give more coverage to non-elite people and nations; to report background, complex, structural and longer-term developments; to emphasise that which does not fit stereotypes and report more from culturally unfamiliar places; to counterbalance a view of the world as composed only of dramatic and unpredictable events; and to report more positive stories (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 84–85). It is not clear how keen Durham (1998) is on positive stories—on good news—but despite sounding somewhat austere, her approach can help us to think afresh about news. She writes as if the privileging and foregrounding of the most oppressed ought to be central to each and every news story, although she gives few detailed indications of how it might be done in practice. I certainly think there is something in what she says, and that examples of how it works in practice can be found (Harcup 2020), but every news story? I make no such demand of the news. The news can seek out, more often than it does, the people directly involved in stories at ground level and report more frequently from the bottom up. The news can go, more often than it does, where the silences are to actively listen to peoples’ stories and perspectives rather than limiting ‘ordinary people’ to walk-on parts in brief vox-pops. And the news can, more often than it does, foreground the stories of the oppressed rather than the shenanigans (or tweets) of the elite. Developing the relationships necessary to try to see, and report, the world from the bottom up can be challenging, yet the effort is worth it because such an approach can enrich our experience as consumers of the news. So can stepping aside from routine coverage and asking awkward questions or pointing out awkward facts. Such as when CNN reported the deaths of civilians, including many children, in Yemen by focusing on the Western companies that made and supplied the deadly weapons. The report included an infographic that clearly linked Raytheon with 155 1

 https://www.channel4.com/news/by/lindsey-hilsum.

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civilian casualties in Sanaa and 97  in Mastaba, and Lockheed Martin/ General Dynamics with an unknown number of civilian casualties in Saada (Elbagir et  al. 2018). As the journalist and media commentator Tim Shorrock (2018) tweeted at the time: ‘This should be standard in war reporting’. It was a particularly interesting news item, and infographic, not simply because of the information it conveyed but also because of the way that it demonstrated how choice is an integral part of reporting. The CNN reporters’ approach was unusual in making the involvement of weapons companies obvious, so it looked as though there had been a journalistic choice to do so, whereas not including such information is the norm, and therefore does not look like a choice. But a choice it still is, regardless.

News Stories Can Resonate and Inspire News is endlessly fascinating, sometimes because of what is being reported, sometimes because of how it is being reported, and sometimes both. And it does not all have to be doom and gloom from the tomb. There is often something in the news to raise a laugh or raise the spirits, and for all our analysing, theorising and critiquing of news values, we should not lose sight of that fact. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that there is some good news out there, and perhaps it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. News stories can resonate, sometimes in different ways and via unpredictable or roundabout routes. The news can certainly be sad and dispiriting at times, evoking feelings of despair—or news avoidance—within the audience. But it is not all like that; and, as Berger notes (above), even the saddest news might engender indignation and action rather than despair. The news can also be uplifting and inspiring. When the aforementioned teacher Chris Searle was sacked from my school for publishing a booklet of pupils’ poems, hundreds of us made the news by going on strike. The 15-and-16-year-old girls who organised it tipped off the news media, with the consequence that, when we refused to go into school and staged a mass picket outside the gates, there were reporters, photographers and TV cameras on hand to record our action. Having made the headlines, we stayed out on strike the following day and even staged an impromptu march through central London (Harcup 2013: 28). It just so happened that, in the audience watching that evening’s TV news was one of Chris Searle’s former university tutors, Marjorie Hourd,

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who then wrote him a letter to say how inspirational she had found the story about our strike: ‘I nearly wept when I saw your kids crossing Trafalgar Square on Friday—I felt that all I have fought for in nearly 40  years was indeed coming to pass’ (quoted in Searle 1998: 26–27). Many years before, she had taught him that poetry could resonate in the classroom, but we showed that it could also resonate on the streets. By doing so we were asserting our agency, but it was the news industry that took our story and amplified it locally, nationally and even internationally. Hearing about our story on the news inspired others in turn—I know that because they have subsequently said so—just as, nearly 50 years later, hearing about the US school protests against mass shootings helped inspire one teenager’s protest over climate change, which in turn inspired climate emergency strikes around the world.

Conclusion: We Can Do Better In the decades since the Aberfan disaster grabbed my attention and encouraged an empathetic response, countless other news stories have resonated with me as a member of the news audience. But one in particular stands out as a positive antidote to Aberfan. That was the dramatic rescue of the 33 Chilean miners trapped underground in 2010, watched in awe by strangers all over the world (BBC 2010). I was thousands of miles away in Sheffield, but everywhere I went that day—at work, in shops, on public transport—people would share the latest news from Chile, smiling and declaring to anyone around: ‘Another one’s out!’. What an inspiring story, echoed more recently by the rescue of the boys’ football team from a cave in Thailand, even though both stories may also have their less uplifting elements (Laing 2018). Having reflected upon the bad news and the good news about news, it seems to me that the news can learn from such events. We can’t expect such drama every day, of course, but we can surely do better at recognising the potential for members of the news audience to identify with the experiences of others, who are like ourselves but different. To that end, the news could usefully take more account of: • Empathy—not just with people as victims, but with people as active agents in their own lives; • Curiosity—about ‘normal life’ as well as about the extremes, telling positive stories as well as negative ones;

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• Hearing from people at the bottom and at the margins—as well as the elites and/or the loudest; • Active listening to different people—not just hearing what they say; • Adding context—can audiences really make sense of news stories without reference to context and structural forces? The news at its best can inform us as well as entertain us; it can raise our spirits and make us laugh out loud at times, as well as making us sad, angry or moved to action. News comes in all shapes and sizes but the very best news resonates by engaging imaginative empathy and encouraging us to express our own agency. As that old alternative Views on the news document (above) put it, ‘a good story for me is one that reinforces the ability of the mass of people to do things for themselves’ (quoted in Harcup 2013: 172). More of that would be good news indeed.

References Atton, C. (2002). Alternative media. London: Sage. Auden, W.  H. (1938). Musee des Beaux Arts. Retrieved from http://english. emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html. BBC. (2010, October 14). Key moments: Chile miners rescue. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11535245. Bell, M. (1998). The journalism of attachment. In M. Kieran (Ed.), Media ethics (pp. 15–22). London: Routledge. Berger, J. (1975, November 27). ‘Pied piper’, book review of Chris Searle’s Classrooms of resistance, New Society, 497–498. Berger, J. (1991 [1980]). About looking. New York: Vintage International. Bernstein, C. (1992, June 8). The idiot culture. New Republic, 22–28. Boltanski, L. (1999). Distant suffering: Morality, media and politics. Trans. G. Burchell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruegel, P. (circa 1562). La chute d’Icare. Retrieved from https://www.finearts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/pieter-i-bruegel-la-chute-d-icare?artist= bruegel-brueghel-pieter-i-1. Democracy Now! (2018a, December 11). School strike for climate: Meet 15-year-­ old activist Greta Thunberg, who inspired a global movement. Democracy Now! Retrieved from https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/11/ meet_the_15_year_old_swedish. Democracy Now! (2018b, December 12). Trump’s energy adviser runs away when questioned by Democracy Now at UN climate talks. Democracy

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Now! Retrieved from https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/12/ trumps_energy_adviser_runs_away_when. Durham, M. G. (1998). On the relevance of standpoint epistemology to the practice of journalism: The case for ‘strong objectivity’. Communication Theory, 8(2), 117–140. Elbagir, N., Abdelaziz, S., Browne, R., Arvanitidis, B., & Smith-Spark, L. (2018, August 17). Bomb that killed 40 children in Yemen was supplied by the US. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/17/middleeast/us-saudi-yemen-bus-strike-intl/index.html. Evans, H. (1997 [1978]). Pictures on a page: Photo-journalism, graphics and picture editing. London: Pimlico. Galtung, J., & Ruge, M. (1965). The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research, 2(1), 64–91. Galtung, J., & Vincent, R. (1992). Global glasnost: Toward a new world information and communication order? Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Goodman, A. (2017). Democracy Now! Twenty years of covering the movements changing America. New York: Simon & Schuster. Griggs, B. (2015, September 3). Photographer describes “scream” of migrant boy’s “silent body”. CNN. Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/03/ world/dead-migrant-boy-beach-photographer-nilufer-demir/. Harcup, T. (2009). An insurrection in words: East End voices in the 1970s. Race & Class, 51(2), 3–17. Harcup, T. (2013). Alternative journalism, alternative voices. London: Routledge. Harcup, T. (2014). A dictionary of journalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harcup, T. (2020). What’s the point of news? A study in ethical journalism. Palgrave Macmillan. Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2001). What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies, 2(2), 261–280. Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2017). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18(12), 1470–1488. Hermida, A. (2010). Twittering the news: The emergence of ambient journalism. Journalism Practice, 4(3), 297–308. Hilsum, L. (2018, September 12). Families reunited as Ethiopia-Eritrea border re-opens. Channel 4 News. Retrieved from https://www.channel4.com/news/ families-reunited-as-ethiopia-eritrea-border-re-opens. Jackson, C. (2016, October 21). Aberfan: The mistake that cost a village its children. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/ idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47. Kopytowska, M. (2015). Ideology of ‘here and now’: Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies, 12(3), 347–365.

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Laing, A. (2018, July 11). Chile miners urge rescued Thai boys to be wary of new-­found fame. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/ us-thailand-accident-cave-chile/chile-miners-urge-rescued-thai-boys-to-bewary-of-new-found-fame-idUSKBN1K101Y. O’Neill, D., & Harcup, T. (2009). News values and selectivity. In K.  Wahl-­ Jorgensen & T. Hanitzsch (Eds.), Handbook of journalism studies (pp. 161–174). NJ: Routledge. O’Neill, D., & Harcup, T. (2020). News values and news selection. In K. Wahl-­ Jorgensen & T.  Hanitzsch (Eds.), Handbook of journalism studies (2nd ed., pp. 213–228). NJ: Routledge. Robinson, F. (2011). Stop talking and listen: Discourse ethics and feminist care ethics in international political theory. Millennium, 39(3), 845–860. Searle, C. (1998). None but our words: Critical literacy in classroom and community. Buckingham: Open University Press. Shorrock, T. (2018, August 18). Tweet by @TimothyS, 9.52pm. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/TimothyS/status/1030920463822868480. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2019). Emotions, media and politics. Cambridge: Polity. Wainwright, M. (2001, July 9). Violent images mask a tradition of harmony. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jul/09/ race.world. Wainwright, M. (2003, July 17). Unseated MP grabs a lavatory chain. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jul/17/northerner.martinwainwright. Wainwright, M. (2012, June 21). Olympic torch shows how to bring the regions into London’s loop. Guardian. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2012/jun/21/olympic-torchbradford-media-olympic-games-cultural-olympiad. Wasserman, H. (2013). Journalism in a new democracy: The ethics of listening. Communicatio: South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research, 39(1), 67–84.

CHAPTER 3

News Values in Audience-Oriented Journalism: Criteria, Angles, and Cues of Newsworthiness in the (Digital) Media Context Steve Paulussen and Peter Van Aelst

Introduction In this era where news is ubiquitous, increasingly consumed on mobile phones, spread faster than ever across media outlets and platforms, and shaped and reshaped by user interventions and algorithms, notions of news and newsworthiness are broadening. In fact, the definition of news is constantly subject to change due to social, economic, and technological developments. The concept of ‘news values’ enables journalism scholars to account for this ever-changing nature of news because values fluctuate depending on the given context and time in which they are applied. In other words, journalists’ notion of newsworthiness is not fixed, but

S. Paulussen (*) • P. Van Aelst University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]

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changes as society and the media environment change. This is exactly why the question of ‘what is news?’ is and should be put under constant review. In light of the recent ‘audience turn’ in journalism and journalism scholarship alike (Costera Meijer 2019), we may thus expect future studies to find that news values are becoming increasingly audience-oriented. However, such an expansion towards audience orientations may further complicate and confound our understanding of news values and the role they play in journalism. Therefore, the first goal of this chapter is to discuss some of the persistent challenges and confusions surrounding the concept of news values, and give suggestions of how these issues might be addressed in future research. The second goal of the chapter is to reflect on how recent changes in digital journalism, and particularly the growing role of audience analytics, are affecting the construction of news and newsworthiness. Before we look ahead, we must first briefly look back at how the literature on news values has evolved from the classic study by Galtung and Ruge (1965) till now.

Different Perspectives in News Value Research In 2016, Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of their article ‘What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited’ with an update (Harcup and O’Neill 2017). Their study from 2001 had by then reached seminal status, and is still among the most cited articles in the field of journalism studies of the past two decades. Yet the update was welcome and significant in many respects. First and foremost, it was logical and consistent as the authors themselves had emphasized in their 2001 study that news values are continuously evolving due to the changing social, economic, and technological circumstances in which journalists operate. In fact, this was initially the major motivation for them to revisit the landmark work of Galtung and Ruge (1965). When John Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge investigated the news coverage on three foreign political crises in four Norwegian broadsheet newspapers in the beginning of the 1960s, they were primarily interested in the journalistic process of gatekeeping. Since not all events in these crises made it into the news, they wondered how journalists judged a specific event to be worthy of publication. While they were not the first scholars to engage with this question—Walter Lippmann discussed the nature of news and the concept of news value already a century ago in his key work ‘Public Opinion’ (1922)—Galtung and Ruge’s work did resonate

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most widely. Most journalism students have been and are still being made familiar with Galtung and Ruge’s set of twelve news factors: frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition, reference to elite nations, reference to elite people, reference to persons, and reference to something negative. This taxonomy is accompanied by two important underlying assumptions. The first assumption is that the more news values a given event possesses, the more likely it is to be judged as newsworthy and thus to be selected for publication. The second assumption is that journalists use these news values not only as criteria for news selection but also as textual features or devices for processing and structuring the information about the event into a news story. After the selection decision, journalists will make the news values that led them to that decision salient in their reporting, thus leading to a certain distortion of reality towards those news values, which will subsequently be subject to replication in the audience’s processing of the news story (Galtung and Ruge 1965). As we will see below, both assumptions have been further developed, but also criticized, in later research. Galtung and Ruge’s taxonomy of news values paved the way for other media scholars to conduct research into the news selection criteria used by journalists, often resulting in entirely new or additional sets of news values. However, the academic literature has developed in different, and somewhat disconnected, strands of news value research. One strand of research emerged in German media scholarship and was primarily occupied with the “psychology of news decisions” (Donsbach 2004). From this perspective, news factors are regarded as “general human selection criteria, deductible from the psychology of perception” (Eilders 2006: 9). Schulz (1982) argued, for instance, that people’s perceptions of newsworthiness are guided by cognitive processes related to status, valence, relevance, identification, consonance, and dynamics. Donsbach (2004) concluded that journalists’ news selection behaviour is driven by two underlying psychological processes: a need for social validation of perceptions and a need to preserve one’s existing predispositions. Comparing journalists’ and audience perceptions of newsworthiness, Eilders (2006: 10–11) notes that both groups are more likely to pay attention and assign relevance to events that carry elements of reach (or impact), conflict (or controversy), prominence (or status), and continuity—for audiences, the level of unexpectedness as well as individual interests and preferences play also a role.

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Alongside the European, mainly German, tradition, similar research into the predictors of news coverage has been conducted by scholars in the United States. Staab (1990) refers to James K. Buckalew as one of the first scholars who systematically analysed journalists’ news decision behaviour, leading him to distinguish between six news factors: significance, normality, prominence, proximity, timeliness, and visuality (Buckalew 1969). Later, Shoemaker and her colleagues did important work on clarifying and grouping news values in two broader categories of deviance on the one hand and social significance on the other (see Shoemaker et  al. 1991; Shoemaker and Cohen 2006). Golan (2008) and Wu (2000) made major contributions to the literature on the predictors of international news coverage, identifying, for instance, the role of cultural proximity and a nation’s prominence in the hierarchy of nations as crucial news values in foreign news reporting (see also Joye et  al. 2016). What the above-mentioned German and American studies have in common is that they consider news factors as independent variables that determine news selection. This is what Staab (1990: 427) describes as the causal model of news value research: “The different news factors are regarded as causes (independent variables), the reporting of journalists is seen as an effect (dependent variable)”. Besides the causal model, Staab (1990) identifies a functional model that considers news values not as inherent characteristics of an event but rather as an outcome of the news production process. From this perspective, news values are regarded as being instrumentalized by journalists: once they have decided to cover an event, they ascribe news values to the event in order to explicate and legitimize their selection decisions and to make the story accessible to the audience. As such, news values add meaning to the selected event and help shape the news story. This perspective on news and newsworthiness as social constructions underlies the research work on news selection by leading media scholars such as Schlesinger (1978), Golding and Elliott (1979), and Bell (1991). Also the studies by Harcup and O’Neill (2001, 2017) fit in this constructivist tradition, as the authors themselves assert, with an explicit reference to Staab (1990), that “news selection is not based merely on intrinsic aspects of events, but also on functions external to events themselves, including occupational routines and constraints, and ideology whereby news is a ‘socially determined construction of reality’” (O’Neill and Harcup 2019: 223). While the scholars mentioned so far are primarily interested in the sociology of journalism, the idea that news values are constructs strategically

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used and instrumentalized by journalists in the production of news stories also appeals to researchers interested in the language of journalism. As suggested by the title of his book The Language of News Media, Allan Bell (1991) already recognized the discursive function of (certain) news values, and distinguished between event-related, routine-related, and text-related news values. Building on the idea that news values are reflected and expressed in the language of news, Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple propose a discursive approach to news values (Caple and Bednarek 2013; Bednarek and Caple 2017). The focus shifts from news values as criteria for news selection to news values as angles for news treatment or presentation. Instead of asking why events become news, the question is how events are presented as newsworthy (Caple 2018). In sum, news value researchers have taken different routes since Galtung and Ruge came up with their taxonomy of news factors. While the different perspectives are complementary and compatible, we believe that future research in this domain would benefit from a more rigid use of terminology and clear positioning in scholarly literature. When analysing news and newsworthiness, researchers should clarify whether they start from a causal or functional model of thinking, and whether they approach and conceptualize news values either from a gatekeeping perspective, a discursive perspective, or a cognitive perspective—or any combination of these three. Below, we elaborate these arguments.

Predicting News Decisions (or Not) A crucial epistemological question concerns the predictability of news coverage (see also Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006). The idea that news decisions can be predicted lies at the heart of the causal model in news value research, according to which “news is published because of its particular qualities (news factors) and because of a consensus as to the significance of these qualities” (Staab 1990: 427). In other words, in the causal model, newsworthiness is established by two elements: the (intensity of) intrinsic qualities of an event, on the one hand, and the significance ascribed to these qualities, on the other hand. Kepplinger and Ehmig (2006) propose a framework that refers to the event qualities as ‘news factors’ and to the ascribed significance as ‘news value’. News factors are the objective characteristics that a given event possesses, and can vary in intensity. For example, the intensity of the ‘magnitude’ (news factor) of an accident will depend on the number of casualties. Each news factor will be further

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weighed for its significance (news value) by journalists on the basis of more subjective criteria, which may vary depending on the medium the journalist works for (e.g. quality or tabloid media), their occupational routines and pragmatics, and their professional or personal norms and beliefs. The higher the sum and intensity of news factors that a given event possesses, and the higher the significance attributed to each of these news factors, the higher the chance the event will be selected for publication. The framework proposed by Kepplinger and Ehmig (2006) has inspired other researchers to use and further develop news factor theory to explain and predict news selection. Methodologically, some scholars opted for input-output analysis (e.g. Buckalew 1969; Gant and Dimmick 2000), comparing the stories and information that enter the newsroom with those that eventually get published. Even more reliable, but also more specific, are comparisons between the characteristics of real world events and the reports published about them, which has been done in some studies on international news coverage (e.g. Joye et al. 2016). More recently, some scholars turned to experimental methods to analyse which news values influence the news selection by journalists (e.g. Helfer and Van Aelst 2016). Each of these methods allows researchers to overcome one of the most important limitations of content analysis, still the most used method in news value research. As many critics have argued, content analysis is not apt to test the predictability of news decisions because it does not take into account the events that were not selected for publication. As a consequence, besides the fact that it blurs distinctions between news selection and news treatment, news value research based on content analysis can merely help to explain in hindsight why an event has been selected for publication (Boukes and Vliegenthart 2020: 281). Still, despite—or maybe due to—the variety of methods used, and their limitations, news value research in the causal model has produced a substantial and quite coherent body of knowledge on the determinants of journalists’ news selection behaviour (for comprehensive overviews, see Caple 2018 and O’Neill and Harcup 2019). It should be remarked that news factors do not only apply to events but also to other information that can become news, such as public statements. Indeed, as noted by O’Neill and Harcup (2019: 213), news can relate to a specific event (something that has actually happened), but it can also relate to any form of written or spoken communication (something that has been said), in which that utterance can be considered as the ‘event’ to be covered. In the Netherlands, Schafraad and colleagues

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conducted input-output analyses on the news selection of press releases sent by universities (Kroon and Schafraad 2013) and corporate companies (Schafraad et al. 2016), showing that the presence and cumulative intensity of a number of factors in press releases (including prominence, controversy, dynamics, surprise, elite, or negative consequences) are predictive for publication. The studies suggest that PR practitioners can take these news factors into account when writing a press release. Put differently, newsworthiness can be manipulated or manufactured by the source. Gatekeeping studies have shown that, due to scarce resources, journalists are indeed inclined to favour pre-fabricated content, in which the newsworthiness is established and emphasized by the source (Gandy 1982; Bell 1991). Hence, events or statements are socially and discursively construed as newsworthy by journalists and their sources, a process in which news factors function as variables to which value can be added (see also Bednarek and Caple 2012). As said, the two-component theory of news selection proposed by Kepplinger and Ehmig (2006) distinguishes between news factors, referring to the intrinsic qualities of an event, and news values, referring to the significance attributed to the news factors based on the mental and occupational constructs held by journalists (see also Eilders 2006). Yet, some scholars argue that news values are not only to be found at the individual mental or cognitive level but also at the organizational level of the newsroom floor. As emphasized in several foundational newsroom ethnographies in the 1970s, news events do not spontaneously “select themselves” on the basis of their intrinsic qualities (Hall 1973, cited in O’Neill and Harcup 2019: 215), but their newsworthiness is, for a large part, externally derived from the “pragmatics of production routines” (Golding and Elliott 1979: 114). Drawing on Harcup and O’Neill (2017), we could say, for instance, that ‘power elite’, ‘magnitude’, and ‘relevance’ are typical examples of intrinsic, event-related news values, whereas ‘exclusivity’ or the ‘news organization’s agenda’ are clearly externally imposed, routine-­ related news values. Nevertheless, the difference between event-related and routine-related news values is not always clear. For instance, the news value of ‘drama’ can be regarded as an intrinsic characteristic of an event— according to Harcup and O’Neill (2017) ‘drama’ is inherently present in events such as “escapes, accidents, searches, sieges, rescues, battles, or court cases” (p.  1482)—, but it can also be considered as reflective of journalists’ routinized tendency to sensationalize or dramatize their news stories. In other words, ‘drama’ can be defined both as an intrinsic event

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quality and as a journalistically constructed story feature. This relates to the functions of news values in journalism, which we will further discuss in the next section.

Distinguishing Between News Criteria, Angles, and Cues All studies discussed in the previous section aim to explain or predict why events or statements become news (see also Caple 2018). Such studies conceptualize news values as the criteria on the basis of which journalists make their news judgements during the gatekeeping process. The focus lies on studying the factors that increase the chance of an event to pass the media gates. As said above, these journalists’ selection criteria can be event-related or routine-related. Additionally, some authors identified a set of text-related criteria that increase the chance of an event or item to be picked up for news coverage, such as its clarity/unambiguity, its brevity, or its visual appeal (Golding and Elliott 1979; Bell 1991). When considering news values as selection criteria, it must be kept in mind that journalists apply these criteria rather unconsciously as they have been internalized in their daily news routines. Journalists therefore tend to argue that their news decisions are based on their professional ‘gut feeling’ or their ‘nose for news’ rather than on a clear set of selection criteria. However, based on newsroom observations and interviews with Danish journalists, Schultz (2007) concluded that this journalistic ‘gut feeling’ is actually guided by at least six criteria, namely a preference for timeliness, relevance, identification, conflict, sensation, and exclusivity, all of which seem to be “self-evident and self-explaining to the practitioners” (p. 190). Galtung and Ruge (1965) already noted that news values do not only influence journalists’ selection decisions but also affect how the event is presented in a news story. The fact that journalists make the newsworthiness of a selected event salient in their reporting leads to a certain distortion of reality. In this respect, it is useful to consider news values as news angles or frames through which the news story can be told. To better understand the function of news values as angles or storytelling devices, Bednarek and Caple (2017) call for a discursive approach to news values. Inspired by scholars in the domain of critical discourse analysis, this approach invites researchers to examine the linguistic devices and visual images that journalists use to emphasize certain aspects of an event and to

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shape and package events for news consumption by audiences, hence discursively ascribing newsworthiness to the event (Caple 2018: 9). A discursive perspective on news values allows researchers to account for the commercial and ideological dimensions in news decision-making. Indeed, while commercial considerations directly affect journalists’ news selection choices (Allern 2002), they also influence how news values are discursively constructed and played out in the presentation stage of news production. In their news treatment of events, journalists tend to emphasize and inflate aspects of conflict, negativity, or sensationalism so as to make the news story more attractive for the audiences to which it has to be sold. A discursive approach may enhance more normative research into the distortions and biases caused by news values as it allows researchers to “explore the extent to which an event is made more newsworthy than it ‘deserves’ in terms of its material reality” (Caple and Bednarek 2016: 451). Thirdly and finally, besides looking at news values as criteria (gatekeeping perspective) or story angles (discursive perspective), one can also consider news values as cognitive cues. From a cognitive perspective, newsworthiness has been defined as merely a mental judgment that people make based on certain cues that are available in a news story (Shoemaker 2006). This implies that news value is derived from news items when people process—and replicate—the information that is present in that item. News values can then serve as cues that attract people’s attention, particularly if such cues indicate a high degree of deviance and/or social significance (Shoemaker and Cohen 2006). Audience members use news values as cues by which they can selectively choose and assign relevance to news stories presented to them (Eilders 2006). As we will argue in the next section, conceptualizing news values as cues has become more relevant in an age of information abundance where not only journalists but also audiences and algorithms have to navigate an overwhelming amount of information.

Bringing in the Audience (Again) Harcup and O’Neill (2017) emphasize that news values differ and change over time and place. Therefore, they argue that it is important to consider the impact of social media on the selection, presentation, and re-selection of news. Although the production of news is still to a large extent controlled by journalists and their sources, on and through social media the audience increasingly has a direct and indirect influence on the

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gatekeeping process, and thus also on the construction of news and newsworthiness (Paulussen et al. 2016). In the remainder of this chapter, we reflect on why and how the audience can and should be taken into account in future news value research. We have to be aware, however, that the audience has actually never been completely absent in news value research. This is most obvious within the cognitive approach to news values as researchers in this domain conceptualize newsworthiness as a relational construct that depends on audience perception (Eilders 2006). Yet also the sociological newsroom ethnographies of the 1970s, such as the one by Golding and Elliott (1979: 114), showed that journalists’ assumptions about audience interests are one of the driving forces behind news values (besides efficiency considerations about the event’s accessibility and the news story’s fit). Other researchers have criticized the market logic underlying many news values, arguing that they merely reflect consumer preferences rather than journalistic norms (Allern 2002; see also Strömbäck et al. 2012). These examples show that previous research acknowledges that the audience is always at least in the back of journalists’ minds when they decide what’s news. As such, the audience has always indirectly influenced—and skewed—journalists’ notion of newsworthiness. Yet, it is clear that the role and impact of the audience in journalism has increased, and is still increasing, in the digital and social media context (Domingo 2019; Picone et  al. 2015); hence, journalism scholars also have to reconsider the extent and ways in which the audience turn in journalism affects notions of news and newsworthiness. A first way to examine how audiences affect the construction of newsworthiness could be to compare professional journalism with citizen journalism practices. For instance, Paulussen and D’heer (2013) found that in hyperlocal news reporting, compared to professional reporters, citizen journalists seem to be more likely to produce stories with a high degree of ‘consonance’, ‘cultural relevance’, ‘reference to persons’ (and particularly, references to themselves), and a reference to ‘emotions’. Borger et  al. (2019) came to similar results in their comparative analysis of news content published on five participatory journalism websites in the Netherlands: a large share of the content contained ‘soft’ news values, such as ‘personalization’ and ‘good news’. Moreover, the researchers observed that “the share of hard news values increases and that of soft news values decreases when professional control over content is stronger” (p. 458). However, as the studies are based on content analysis, it is not possible to conclude

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from these findings that citizen journalists ascribe more newsworthiness to events with ‘soft news’ qualities because another explanation could be that citizen journalists discursively develop these news values as story angles to justify and legitimize their pragmatic selection choices. Future studies could rely on, for instance, input-output analysis (cf. Schafraad et al. 2016) or on vignette-based experimental designs (cf. Helfer and Van Aelst 2016) to investigate to what extent citizen journalists apply distinct selection criteria when judging whether events are worth reporting (causal model). Or they could opt for ethnographic observation to examine whether ‘softer’ news values are used by citizen journalists either to guide selection choices or merely to discursively legitimize their news decisions afterwards (functional model). News value research can also make an audience turn by starting to consider readers as ‘secondary gatekeepers’ (Singer 2014). Through their clicking, liking, sharing, and commenting behaviours, users on digital and social media actively influence the production and distribution of news. Readers’ online behaviours directly affect the visibility of news content as most popular news items are ranked in most-read lists and are more likely to appear in people’s news feeds on social media. Journalism scholars have begun to examine to what extent the popularity of news items accords with traditional news values. A study by Lee and Chyi (2014) suggests that a significant group of (especially young) news users perceive a lot of news to be not noteworthy, whereby ‘noteworthiness’ is conceptualized in terms of people’s individual perceptions of a news item’s relevance and interestingness. However, other studies found little evidence for the existence of a gap between journalistic and audience perceptions of newsworthiness, despite some differences in preferred topics (Wendelin et al. 2017; Shoemaker et al. 2010). It should be noted, however, that audience behaviour metrics do not necessarily reflect people’s news preferences because user practices “appear to be much more complex, layered, and even paradoxical than can be revealed by the figures themselves” (Costera Meijer 2019: 394). This implies that audience metrics, such as click rates, may actually tell us more about people’s curiosity than about the news item’s worth or popularity. Yet, audience metrics can be regarded both as cause and effect of news-­ making. A high number of shares or comments on social media may increase the perceived newsworthiness of an event or issue. Audience analytics are also used by journalists to estimate the likelihood of a news story to generate much sharing and commenting on social media—this is what

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Harcup and O’Neill (2017: 1482) define as a story’s ‘shareability’. In both cases, audience metrics serve as an independent variable informing journalists’ news selection decisions. More research is needed on the impact of audience analytics on news decisions in general, and on the role of ‘shareability’ as a journalistic selection criterion in particular. Yet, audience metrics can also be considered as a dependent variable, in which case high rates of clicks, shares, and comments are considered as the result of how a news story is presented to the audience. By accentuating the newsworthy elements, journalists treat their news stories in such a way so as to increase their attractiveness, which may influence the number of clicks, shares and comments the story will generate. Future studies could investigate what kind of news angles and frames work well to increase audience metrics. To examine the impact of audience metrics on journalists’ news judgement, Lamot and Van Aelst (2020) conducted a survey-embedded experiment in which political journalists were asked to rank a set of five news story headlines from most to least prominent on a fictional homepage of a news outlet, whereby each headline was accompanied by analytical data indicating the story’s real-time popularity (increasing, decreasing, or stable). They found that stories with positive analytics were genuinely ranked higher compared with stories in the control condition, whereas stories with negative analytics were ranked lower. However, this effect was only significant for the soft and positively framed news stories as the audience analytics did not seem to influence the ranking position of hard and negatively framed stories. These findings are in line with a study by Nelson and Tandoc (2019) showing that news editors admit that they let audience analytics inform their news decisions, but only when it comes to ‘soft news’. However, since Lamot and Van Aelst (2020) asked respondents to rank headlines of news stories that were supposed to be already selected for publication, we cannot conclude from the findings that metrics and estimations about the audience’s interest in an event or story serve as a criterion for news selection, but they do seem to be used as a cue for journalists’ quick assessment of an item’s popularity, thus influencing how, and how prominently, the news is presented for consumption to the audience. Especially in an era where much news reporting is based on content that is already available online, it is important to stress the function of news values as cues for news recognition. In order to avoid being overwhelmed by the constant stream of information, journalists and audiences need to make quick assessments of whether a story is worth the attention.

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García-Perdomo et al. (2018) show that people’s news sharing on social media can be explained by news factors and angles salient in news texts. More specifically, by highlighting elements of human interest, controversy, conflict, and oddity in news stories, journalists can trigger people’s news sharing behaviour. In a similar vein, a study by Winter et al. (2016) shows that the audience’s selective attention to news is influenced by message and social cues, such as the degree of message valence and the number of social recommendations (clicks and Facebook likes). Other studies have pointed at the importance of visual elements as triggers for people’s attention to news (Keib et al. 2018), which is in line with Harcup and O’Neill (2017) who identified audio-visuals as a journalistic criterion for news judgement. Future research could further investigate which and how textual, visual, and contextual characteristics of content on digital and social media serve as mental cues for journalists and audiences to make a quick assessment of its newsworthiness. Moreover, research on news cues becomes even more relevant in light of the emergence of automated journalism. A pioneering study in this domain suggests, for instance, that indicators of source transparency, recency, and the number of related articles written about the story serve as news cues. This means that they trigger heuristics (or mental shortcuts) that tend to influence users’ perceptions of message credibility, newsworthiness, and likelihood of clicking on the news lead (Sundar et al. 2007). Given that such news cues do not require human judgement but can be automatically detected as features in a text (or its immediate context), they can be implemented in the architecture of news search engines, news bots, and social media algorithms. This opens up new questions and challenges about how and to what extent news decision-making practices once performed by humans can and should be transferred and replicated in the algorithms underlying machine-based forms of news gatekeeping and reporting (Carlson 2018). Aside from asking how news algorithms influence the journalistic ‘gut feeling’, it is equally important to investigate how the occupational, ideological, and commercial logics behind news values affect the configuration of news algorithms. In this respect, we agree with Nechushtai and Lewis (2019) that from a normative perspective, future research could engage with the critical question of “what kind of news gatekeepers do we want machines to be?”. We want to add that this subsumes the question of what kind of news values should, and should not, be reproduced in automated journalism.

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Conclusion Looking back at the literature on news construction and newsworthiness, this chapter has tried to bring together the different perspectives in news value research, which can be described as a gatekeeping perspective, a discursive perspective, and a cognitive perspective. While the cognitive approach follows a causal model of thinking in which news values are seen as cognitive ‘cues’ to assess the newsworthiness of an event or news item, the discursive approach to news values draws on a functional model of thinking, and considers news values as semantic devices (or ‘angles’) through which a news story can be told and sold to the audience. Since the gatekeeping perspective tends to mix causal and functional reasonings, definitions of news values as news ‘criteria’ are sometimes ambivalent, often resulting in different operationalizations of the same variables in different studies (see also Caple 2018). Given the variety of approaches to news values, we agree with Bednarek and Caple (2014: 139) when they “argue against using the term news values in such an all-encompassing way”. Therefore, in this chapter we stressed on the distinction between news values as criteria for news identification (selection), angles for news treatment (distortion), and cues for news (re)cognition (replication). As we hopefully have shown, each approach has made significant contributions to the scholarly knowledge on the processes and mechanisms behind news values. Looking ahead, we engaged with the question of how the increasing role and impact of the audience in journalism may affect notions of news and newsworthiness. We discussed different directions for future research on questions of what, why, and how events become news in a digital and social media context. We tried to emphasize that audience-oriented journalism is not and should not be regarded as a synonym for commercial or market-driven journalism. Instead of reducing audiences merely to their consumer role, audience-oriented journalism requires a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the different, sometimes contradictory ways in which audiences perceive, assign, and add newsworthiness to news events when engaging with news stories, and how this, in turn, affects both human and algorithmic decision-making processes about what kind and form of news may be of value to the audience. We do not suggest that these questions can be tackled in one all-encompassing study, since research requires focus and can therefore only provide partial answers to such complex questions. Yet we argue that news value research can

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benefit from more precision about the theoretical and methodological frameworks researchers use when studying the construction of news and newsworthiness. By distinguishing more clearly between news criteria, angles, and cues, and by moving the audience (back) towards the centre of attention, we believe there is still much valuable research that can be done in this domain.

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CHAPTER 4

News Values and Topics: A 15-Nation News Consumer Perspective Jeffrey S. Wilkinson, August E. Grant, Yicheng Zhu, and Diane Guerrazzi

Today, more than 4.5 billion people are online (Kemp 2020) consuming news and information up to 11 hours per day (Nielsen 2018). Traditional print and broadcast media migrated online in the 1990s, and online news has further evolved by expanding into social media. Multiple platforms J. S. Wilkinson (*) School of Journalism and Graphic Communication, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. E. Grant School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] Y. Zhu School of Journalism and Communications, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China D. Guerrazzi School of Journalism and Mass Communications, San José State University, San Jose, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2021 M. Temmerman, J. Mast (eds.), News Values from an Audience Perspective, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5_4

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enable consumers to permanently alter the time, place, and manner by which they read, watch, or hear the news. As the control over media use has shifted from the creators to the audience, it is useful to explore how audiences for news may have changed or evolved in their views and perceptions of traditional values associated with “news.” This chapter provides insight into the global news environment by presenting and analysing consumers’ perceptions of news values and content from a 15-nation, nine language survey of news consumers, including 1588 responses from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States. This inquiry begins with an exploration of traditional news values, then proposes a set of research questions designed to test the correspondence of these journalistic values with those of news consumers in general and specific groups of news consumers in the 15 countries selected for this study. The analysis then compares two dimensions of news values, conceptual dimensions of newsworthiness (proximity, prominence, etc.) and self-reported interest in specific categories or types of news stories. The findings of this study provide a baseline for newsrooms to consider categories of content that have the greatest interest among local consumers of news. At a time when people depend on information technologies such as smartphones to the point of addiction, patterns of news consumption are in flux around the world. Therefore, scholars and practitioners need to re-think what values are important to audiences in the modern news age. At the heart of this inquiry is how news values may differ around the world. In addition, the results can give journalists a glimpse of the news values of consumers. Comparing consumer news values with those of journalists can help discussions of how news is operationalized. This inquiry begins with an exploration of media use, traditional news values, and categories or news then proposes a set of hypotheses designed to test the correspondence of these journalistic values with those of news consumers. This multinational analysis of news consumers is informed by research on news values, journalistic routines, and patterns of news consumption. The topic of news values has been extensively studied by Western researchers, and there is some agreement on characteristics of news and news values. But the topic is also marked by ambiguity amid cultural differences. Historically journalists agreed on news values and reporting practices, exercising a gatekeeping role in a time of limited media. Audiences

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coalesced around particular news media to be informed about significant events. But today the consumer of news has several choices regarding how to stay informed. Social media and the internet have given news consumers near-absolute power to read, watch, or hear any event of interest or deemed to be significant. They can go to any number of print, broadcast, or online news websites. For example, even neighbourhood news can be a viable content niche if it could be monetized enough to sustain itself (van Kerkhoven and Bakker 2014). Another significant impact resulting from empowering the audience is that the work routines of news workers has changed, with news events posted immediately, often without editing or filters. This immediacy has left some news consumers wary of news from social media (Shearer and Grieco 2019). On the other hand, the ubiquity and convenience of smartphones has made them the device of choice for news and information (Walker 2019). Access to news and information differs from country to country. The information age has helped spawn social movements in several countries (Ang et al. 2014). For example, some developing nations restrict internet access for its citizens, and the adoption of mobile phones with picture and video capability has led to the rise of citizen journalism efforts (Banda 2010). The diffusion of mobile broadband media technologies worldwide has had a democratizing effect on news consumption. There is some evidence that media imperialism processes are in decline (Chadha and Kavoori 2000, 2015), replaced by host news organizations representing government, national, and local interests. Globally, news media may be more in danger of succumbing to rampant commercialism brought about by market-­driven models of media programming. The shift to a market-­ driven model often comes at the expense of diversity and public broadcasting, with too much emphasis on entertainment (Chadha and Kavoori 2015). With the rapid rise of the internet and mobile technologies, there is some question whether terms like “Mass Media” and “Mass Communication” may even be passé or obsolete (Perloff 2015). To best understand how nations and individuals change over time, scholars must periodically re-examine the assumptions regarding news consumers’ perceptions of what makes a story important. These assumptions may vary between countries and cultures, adding a layer of complexity to our understanding of the continuing changes in the field of journalism. News media organizations must provide content that is of interest locally, and stories addressing issues and events outside a nation’s

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borders must include contextual information to make the story salient to the local audience (Guerrazzi et  al. 2016). Other studies affirm that “salience, functionality, concern, interest” reflects interest in an issue (Knobloch et al. 2003, p. 93). Alarming information presented by news media are most effective when the message emphasizes salient information. For example, initial reports of a tornado typically focus on facts regarding the suffering and magnitude of the damage, while follow-up reports will shift emphasis and offer advice on how best to prepare for future storms.

Media Use The consumption of news has shifted with the introduction of new distribution technologies. In the process, audiences have transitioned from passive consumers of news and entertainment programming to active users, distributors, and creators of content via mobile and social platforms (Pew Research Center 2019; Nicholson 2019). One impact of these changes is in substantial consumption of news. As stated in the introduction, more than 4.5 billion people are online (Kemp 2020) consuming news and information up to 11 hours per day (Nielsen 2018). In the United States, online-only news services such as Yahoo News and Huffington Post are now listed alongside traditional news organizations (CNN, NBC, New York Times) as the most popular places people go for news online (Pew Research Center 2019). Globally this reflects the move by audiences towards online and mobile news consumption (Newman 2015). The expectation of news-on-demand gives the consumer both choice and control over what is read or watched. News organizations track audience interest through data analysis, ratings, and metrics. Traditionally, journalists were gatekeepers who decided what would be the news. Today, the consumer decides, and news organizations respond to fulfil the interests that garner the most attention. Having unlimited choice and unlimited access makes it useful to understand the role of metrics in this “market-driven journalism.”

News Values News is information that has value, but it is semantically different from news values. Shoemaker (2006) wrote that “news” is a primitive construct needing no definition in ordinary conversation, but it is difficult to define

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without using the term itself (p. 105). Harcup and O’Neill (2016) offered that studying news values is important because they guide journalists in covering events and packaging stories. News is information about historical events, but news is also a commodity, the product of the news organization. News is indirectly experienced yet may have direct effects. News is generally perceived to be negative because many events described (like tornado described earlier) carry warnings for future behaviour. Thus, categories of “hard news” and “breaking news” tend to be negative (disasters, crime, etc.), and in the era of social media, are increasingly brought forward by citizens (so-called citizen journalism). Harcup and O’Neill (2016) argued that studying news values is important because they reveal how journalists convey the world to news audiences. News values are shorthand characteristics used to guide how journalists pick stories and package them for others. The discussion of news values took shape when Galtung and Ruge (1965) published the seminal article on global news values. They investigated how newspapers decided what stories to cover, and how those decisions shaped perceptions of the world through that news coverage. Since then, several studies have investigated news values and explicated specific terms (Golding and Elliott 1979; Gans 1980; Bell 1991; McGregor 2002). Some of the terms identified as values were quite difficult to operationalize (Shoemaker 2006), like “meaningfulness,” “relevance,” and even “surprise.” Harcup and O’Neill (2001) examined the 12 factors and suggested adding factors labelled (a) Reference to Something Positive; (b) Reference to Elite Organizations or Institutions; (c) Agendas, Promotions, and Campaigns; and (d) Entertainment with subcategories of Picture Opportunities, Reference to Sex, Reference to Animals, Humour, and Showbiz/TV.  Eilders (2006) suggested news values of relevance (or reach), damage (related to conflict/controversy, aggression), elite persons (prominent names or celebrities), continuity (follow-up information about a significant event), proximity (geographically near), and elite-nation (rich and influential nations or cultures). Schultz (2007) identified six news values: timeliness, relevance, identification, conflict, sensation, and exclusivity. Schultz also found that getting a story first (exclusivity) is sometimes given priority over all other values when paired with timeliness. Deviance and social significance have been used to explain audience attention to media event coverage (Lee 2009). Another study identified three primary news values: importance, proximity, and drama (Westerståhl and

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Johansson 1994). These values are similar to relevance, location, and conflict. From the studies which have generated lists of news values, some common terms have emerged. After conducting a thorough review of the news value literature, Parks (2018) identified a list of seven typical news values: timeliness, proximity, prominence, unusualness, conflict, human interest, and impact. While this may not be the definitive list, it provides a useful foundation for investigating news values.

News and Topic Areas News content has also been categorized by topic area. The number and type of topic areas is wide and ever-changing, but there are some overarching terms that enable scholars to make meaningful comparisons. Traditional and commonly used categories of news events include politics, natural disasters (calamity), international relations, business, crime, sports, science, entertainment, health, education, and religion (Mencher 2010). The labels are neither rigid nor exclusive, and categories easily overlap. For example, a famous athlete announcing her retirement can be considered by newsrooms and audiences as either Sports, Business, Celebrity, Entertainment, International News, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, news professionals often have to categorize events with discrete labels like “politics” or “crime.” News consumers are accustomed to searching and finding news stories using the same labels. Virtually any subject that concerns an individual could be part of that individual’s personal news feed. Therefore, this exploratory study investigates the relative importance of standard news values from the perspectives of news consumers across 15 nations. In particular, this study assesses characteristics of event labels associated with newsworthiness. When a person decides something is newsworthy, it means the item is salient. Salience is linked to importance, resulting in more time, effort, and attention in reading, watching, or hearing about the topic of information. Topics that are Salient are typically assigned higher Value by the individual attending to it. The present study draws upon the literature to use the seven news values noted by Parks (2018) with one addition by Eilders (2006) and McGregor (2002). The news value of prominence has been presented in at least two different ways. Prominence is reflected in stories about powerful figures. For example, leaders of nations and generals during war. But

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prominence is also reflected in famous celebrities from the entertainment and sports world. These two aspects of what makes a person “famous” (power versus celebrity) should be measured separately. Therefore, this study will assess how consumers view eight news values: timeliness (information about an ongoing event), proximity (happens somewhere close to you), prominence-power (involving elite nations, institutions, and persons), prominence-fame (related to show business or celebrities), unusualness (the event is unexpected), conflict (reference to something negative), impact (has visual power), and human interest (is emotionally appealing). To investigate how news consumers define news in different countries, this study measured consumers’ perceptions of news topics, news values, and news consumption. Therefore, three broad research questions are proposed: RQ1: What is the relative importance of news topics across the 15 countries in the study? RQ2: What is the relative importance of news values across the 15 countries in the study? RQ3: What are the relationships between internet use and both values and news topics?

Methodology This study employed multiple sources of data collection for a 10-minute, online survey measuring media consumption, news topic preference, news values, and demographic information. The survey was administered to several samples of respondents representing 15 countries in nine languages. Subjects Because the data collection included respondents from 15 countries, it was expected that the response rate might vary significantly across countries. In order to maximize the response rate and the number of respondents in each country, three different tools were employed to identify and recruit respondents. First, a database of registered users for 1World Online was donated to the researchers. This database included approximately 21,000 registered users from more than 100 countries. Inspection of the dataset revealed

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that 10 countries (Brazil, Canada, Chile, India, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States) had at least 400 members in the dataset and could reasonably be expected to produce at least 100 completed surveys. Two independent samples of 200 each were selected at random (using the random number generator within Excel) from the database from those countries represented by 400 or more members. To broaden the representation of countries in the dataset, convenience samples were added using crowdsourcing platforms to obtain responses from China, Australia, South Africa, France, Germany, and Italy. Peru was dropped from the analysis because there were very few completed surveys. Also, researchers were unable to obtain a reliable sample from countries in the Middle East. The first method used an unincentivized appeal, asking respondents in an email to click a link to answer questions about news in their country. The second method used an incentivized appeal, offering one of five $100 Visa gift cards to be given in a random drawing at the conclusion of the study. Those solicited via email received two follow-up emails reminding them to complete the survey. The third data collection technique used crowdsourcing platforms (including Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Clickworkers, Microworkers, and Sojump) to attempt to identify a convenience sample of up to 100 respondents in each country to complete the survey. The 1842 responses received were then reviewed to remove responses that were out of range for individual variables as well as those responses with questionable validity (those that appeared to be “straightlined” or “speeding” through the survey), leaving 1588 valid responses for analysis. Measures Four sets of measures were created for this study. News values were measured by asking respondents to rate each of the eight news values described earlier, derived from McGregor (2002) and Eilders (2006) and summarized by Parks (2018), on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “not at all important” and 5 is “extremely important.” News topics were measured by asking respondents to use a “fill-in the blank” answer asking them to indicate how many articles they would like to read each day for each of 13 topics derived from Shoemaker and Cohen (2006). Media use was measured asking respondents how many hours they used each day on average to consume five different types of media including television, talk radio,

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internet for news, internet for content other than news, social media, and newspapers. Finally, demographic items were added at the end of the questionnaire. Data Collection and Analysis The survey was created with the 1World online survey tool. For the first two data collection waves, MailChimp was used to send individualized and personalized emails to each prospective respondent. The same tool was used to send reminder emails three days and six days after the initial invitation. All such emails identified the universities sponsoring the study and contained a link to the online survey on the 1World website. The English language survey was translated into eight other languages (Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Ukrainian) by native speakers of each language. A second translator was then employed to do back-translations of the survey that could be compared to the initial version to ensure accurate translations. All invitation and follow-up messages were similarly back-translated and verified before they were used. Data Analysis The data collection procedure (15 countries with three samples each) resulted in several separate files that were combined into a single file for cleaning and analysis using SPSS v.20. The final number of valid responses was 1588; the totals by country are reported in Table 4.1.

Results The analysis began with a comparison of news values and topics across the 15 countries included in the study, followed by tests of the hypotheses. RQ1: What is the relative importance of news topics across the 15 countries in the study? Salience was operationalized in this study by asking respondents how many online stories they would like to read on an average day in each of the 13 content areas identified for study. As reported in Table  4.1, the mean number of stories ranged from 1.66 (religion) to 4.35 (science and technology). Surprisingly, respondents to this study generally had higher interest in “niche” news topics than topics that are typically identified as

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Table 4.1  Mean number of stories by topic Descriptive statistics

Science & technology Human interest Entertainment International affairs Education Business/commerce/industry Cultural events Internal politics Health/welfare/social services Government Sports Domestic crimes Religion Valid N (list-wise)

N

Minimum

Maximum

Mean

Std. deviation

1588 1588 1588 1588 1588 1588 1588 1588 1588 1587 1588 1588 1587 1586

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

103.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 90.00 42.00 35.00 100.00 50.00 50.00 50.00 25.00 100.00

4.35 3.71 3.65 3.64 3.21 3.20 3.17 3.04 3.03 2.83 2.61 1.94 1.66

5.16 4.16 4.69 4.20 3.90 3.46 2.81 4.30 3.38 3.48 3.55 2.32 3.97

core news topics. Science and technology topic received the greatest interest (4.35), with human interest second (3.71), entertainment third (3.65), and international affairs fourth (3.64). A second cluster of topics were education (3.21), business (3.20), and cultural events (3.17). Internal politics and health were 3.04 and 3.03 respectively. Government (2.83), Sports (2.61), Domestic Crime (1.94), and Religion (1.66) were ranked at the bottom. While stories about Religion produced the lowest number overall (1.66), Ukraine (4.17), Russia (3.41), and South Africa (3.03) were noticeably high by comparison. At the other end of the spectrum, while respondents from India, Mexico, and South Africa expressed greatest interest in Science and Technology (all above 5.0), China (2.29) and Germany (2.87) were at the bottom. The means of story topic category by country are reported in Table 4.2. One reason for the variation in demand for individual topic by country is that demand for stories varied widely across all topics. Respondents from India, South Africa, and Ukraine reported interest in reading the highest number of stories (52.8, 52.37, 50.26, respectively), almost twice the mean number reported by respondents from Germany and China (27.18, 29.09, respectively). Means and standard deviations for all countries are reported in Table 4.3.

Brazil Canada Chile India Mexico Russia United Kingdom Ukraine United States China Australia Germany France Italy South Africa Total

3.26 3.53 3.25 4.81 4.04 2.88 2.54

3.66 2.86

1.92 2.88 2.34 2.62 2.32 4.96

3.20

1.07 1.89 1.46 2.79 1.20 2.74 1.89

3.17 1.77

1.70 1.93 1.73 1.74 1.07 2.58

1.94

2.61

2.06 4.86 1.74 2.67 1.87 3.30

3.46 2.37

1.40 1.68 2.55 3.97 2.28 2.93 2.01

3.17

2.39 2.90 2.11 3.12 3.96 3.39

3.79 3.06

2.77 3.08 4.01 2.59 4.19 3.14 3.10

3.04

2.91 2.22 2.34 2.76 2.58 3.51

3.62 2.90

2.89 2.88 2.79 4.51 3.37 3.37 2.71

3.64

2.69 3.28 2.69 3.13 2.98 4.10

3.73 3.34

3.99 4.05 4.40 4.36 4.29 3.97 3.61

3.71

2.60 4.02 2.58 3.54 4.06 4.62

3.75 3.29

3.62 3.69 4.29 4.33 4.52 2.82 4.07

3.03

2.63 3.09 1.87 2.60 3.43 3.97

3.88 2.67

2.30 2.43 3.77 4.04 3.32 2.95 2.45

3.21

1.89 3.14 2.24 2.60 3.20 4.91

4.56 2.42

2.90 2.54 4.11 3.89 4.07 2.99 2.55

3.65

3.16 4.55 2.19 3.15 3.39 4.72

3.69 3.43

3.54 3.09 4.11 5.65 3.68 3.35 3.09

4.35

2.29 4.03 2.87 3.73 4.47 5.77

5.11 4.42

4.52 4.78 4.81 5.12 5.42 3.70 4.16

1.66

0.89 1.71 0.97 1.16 1.12 3.03

4.17 0.96

0.85 0.78 1.33 2.22 1.07 3.41 0.55

2.83

1.96 1.82 1.53 2.32 2.19 3.51

3.68 3.16

2.84 2.51 3.39 4.52 3.21 3.03 2.66

Domestic Business/ Sports Cultural Internal International Human Health/ Education Entertainment Science & Religion Government technology events politics affairs interest welfare/ crimes commerce/ social industry services

Table 4.2  Mean number of stories by topic by country

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Table 4.3  Descriptive statistics for story total by country Country code

Mean

N

Std. deviation

India South Africa Ukraine Mexico Chile Russia Australia Canada United States Italy Brazil United Kingdom France China Germany Total

52.80 52.37 50.26 44.64 44.27 41.28 40.43 36.93 36.65 36.63 36.02 35.54 35.14 29.09 27.18 40.08

102 119 118 107 84 118 100 106 105 107 104 106 97 116 97 1586

42.43 46.53 40.67 32.41 35.21 26.99 22.55 25.21 30.55 21.06 21.18 25.79 34.22 24.53 15.34 31.79

RQ2: What is the relative importance of news values across the 15 countries in the study? The pattern of interest in the eight traditional news values was substantially different across countries. As reported in Table  4.4, respondents rated traditional news values of proximity (location), timeliness (updates about a continuing event), and unusualness (unexpectedness or novelty) the highest and most important (mean  =  3.70, 3.55, and 3.52, respectively). Three other news values were rated together as a middle-cluster, Impact, Prominence-Power, and Human Interest (3.11, 3.08, and 3.08, respectively). Noticeably lower and at the bottom were Conflict (negative news, 2.64) and Prominence-Fame (show business or celebrities) (2.23). One-way ANOVA indicated that the measures of importance of the eight news values varied significantly across the ten countries studied (p