Unit 3: What Makes News - Exploring the Criteria
Key Topics
- Facts and verification as cornerstones of journalism and of the work of other information professionals
- News factors or criteria in assessing news value and newsworthiness
- Considerations in making news judgements or in shaping the news
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, educators will be able to:
- Describe the criteria used in assessing the news value or newsworthiness of information
- Critically discuss the basic principles in making judgements about news or in shaping the news
The Genre of News
“Critical thinking doesn’t mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.†– Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, Daniel J. Levitin, 2016
Journalists need to evaluate and make sense of a vast amount of content and consider how to organize it in a way that highlights the issues that are most important so it is comprehensible to an audience that will have very different levels of understanding of the events in question. The judgements involved will include selecting stories deemed to be important (newsworthy) and deciding how to present the information. Inevitably, the form of presentation or "framing" will refect past experience and outlook of the journalists and media institutions. It is important for the audience to understand how stories are framed and to think critically about the process.
Pedagogical Approaches and Activities
As suggested earlier in this Curriculum (Part 1) various pedagogical approaches are possible to adopt when implementing the below suggested activities. Please review the list in Part 1 and decide which approach to apply to the suggested activities below and others that you may formulate.
Textual Analysis
The educator analyses the newsworthiness of each of the front-page stories of a major newspaper (or its online edition), based on the criteria for assessing the news value of a story. This typically includes such factors as:
- Timeliness
- Impact and importance
- Prominence
- Proximity
- Conflict
- Human interest
- Necessity
- Unusualness/Oddity
Besides these normative attributes, news is often selected for its dramatic and even entertainment value. It is also chosen based on implicit ideas about what is ‘important for whom’ and what is the likely ’impact on whom’
They then analyse the stories based on the factors to be considered in making news judgments or in shaping the news. These are:
- Truthfulness: accuracy (getting the facts right) and coherence (making sense of the facts)
- Dedication to the public interest
- Informing, rather than manipulating, the public
- Completeness/comprehensiveness
- Diversity (inclusion of news of all communities, not just targeted audiences)
These normative factors can be seen in the extent to which news items identify their sources, reveal verification used (e.g. triangulation of sources); transparency of journalists' views that affect what they do - such as to what facts and voices are most salient for them, and why. Attention should also be paid to the placement of articles, headlines and font size used, and photographs and captions included.
Contextual Analysis
The educator reviews the coverage of a media organization of choice/relevance on a particular topic and particular day, and compares and contrasts the angling (i.e. selling of a particular point of view or perspective) and treatment (i.e. information performed, sources acknowledged, interviews done, any visual support of news stories) of at least two broadcasters’ coverages.
News Analysis and Self-Assessment
Learners are given two different pieces of news writing on the same subject and are asked to explain which piece is stronger, which is more informative and how the other news article could be improved in terms of its informational quality and conformance with the news genre (for criteria to be used, please refer to Textual Analysis above.)
Ask the following question: How do editorial judgment and audience judgment affect choices of news stories to publish? In addition, how does editorial judgment shape the presentation of a story? Audience judgment shapes the outlet’s presentation of news to serve an audience that supports the news outlet, although some news is tailored for an audience of advertisers or owners - thereby deviating from the normative standards of journalism.
Group Exercises
These are drawn from the
GROUP EXERCISE 1: SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS:
- Why is news important?
- What is lost when journalists or media outlets are stopped from reporting the news?
GROUP EXERCISE 2: IDENTIFY THE VALUES DRIVING NEWS
- Identify the lead article or main headline story of a particular issue of a print or online news platform
- ldentify the news values that have driven the article. Explain how you identified each.
- Are there multiple values? Does the presence of more drivers make the story more important or more interesting?
- Analyse the newsworthiness of the article. Do you think it should have been published? Why or why not?
GROUP EXERCISE 3: BE YOUR OWN EDITOR
- The educator shows a list of 15-20 headlines then asks the learners the following:
- What are the important stories?
- lf you have space/airtime for only five, which ones would you choose? Please give reasons for your selection
- If you are from (a) a TV news channel, (b) broadsheet, (c) tabloid, (d) radio news program, or (e) international news agency , which stories would you choose? Pick only five.
GROUP EXERCISE 4: IN THE AGE OF NEWS VIA A DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY
The educator guides learners to access a series of news items from digital communications companies and conducts an exercise around the following:
- How to tell if the news is from a trusted source?
- What are trusted sources of news? Why are they trusted?
- Is the news real or fabricated but disguised in the genre of news? How can you tell?
- Do social media platforms benefit from false information? What about search engines?
- To what extent should digital communications companies be responsible to manage false information on their platforms?
Assessment & Recommendations
- Refection paper based on textual analysis/contextual analysis/news analysis
- Participation in group learning activities (e.g. workshops, class discussions)
Topics for Further Consideration
- News settings (socio-cultural, political, and economic infuences on the news)
- Effects of news settings on news values (drivers) and editorial processes
- Global fow of information and shaping of the news
- Global news media organizations (e.g. CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC, Deutsche Welle, etc.)