Defining Newsworthy

What makes a story newsworthy? According to the class textbook, there are nine different news values that make something story worthy: timeliness, impact, proximity, prominence, conflict, novelty, currency, affinity, and human interests.

1. Timeliness: This is being most concerned with when something happened. The sooner the story gets out, the better.
2. Impact: How are people being effected by the information? What big events or trends are happening that are making an impact on people?
3. Proximity: The closer the story is to home, the more relevant it is to us.
4. Prominence: What are important and high ranking people doing? If they have a high social status, we care if they are eating at a local cafe.
5. Conflict: Humans have a fascination with fights, arguments, and nastiness. We want to know all of the dirt.
6. Novelty: This value encompasses all of the absurd stories. What strange things have happened that we want to know about? Did a Florida man get arrested running from the police over a bag of potato chips? If so, we want to know about it!
7. Currency: We want to stay up to date with important issues.
8. Affinity: This value mainly focuses on animals. We want to feel sorry for those who can’t help themselves.
9. Human interests: We want to know about what other humans are going through, no matter who they are. Did someone’s house burn down? It doesn’t matter who they are, we just want to know about it.

The one news value that causes controversy is prominence. Does pop culture information classify as news?

Technically, the answer is yes.

Personally, I don’t care to “Keep up with the Kardashians,” but that does not mean other people don’t! I believe that the news value of prominence is newsworthy when it is also tied with another news value.

To explain, here’s an example of what I mean by this. Like I just said, I don’t care to read up on what the Kardashians are eating at for their Christmas dinner. When you tie a prominence news value with my example of human interests, I’m hooked.

If the Kardashians are donating to the Wilson family whose house just burned down, that is news.

Prominence and human interests are both values in this kind of story, and the human interests piece makes all the difference.