Textbook News Values: Stable Concepts, Changing Choices

Abstract

This article examines the historical contingency of news values as evidenced in journalism historiography and more than a century of journalism reporting and writing textbooks dating to 1894. Textbooks are important distillers and (re)constructors of journalists’ conceptions of news and not-news. Findings suggest that although key news values such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, unusualness, conflict, human interest, and impact have been fundamentally stable since the early 1900s, the way those values are applied to reporting depends on the sociocultural context of the era. A key implication is that news values are neither natural nor inevitable, but rather within journalists’ power to change.

An unnatural split: how ‘human interest’ sucks the life from significant news

“…Seventy-five US journalism textbooks published from 1894–2016 – mostly introductory texts for new reporters but including early texts targeting newspaper entrepreneurs and mid-century texts aimed at general audiences – were analyzed for this article. The analysis is part of a larger study (Parks, 2018) focusing on how journalism textbooks have defined news values, and those values’ changing implications for journalistic practice, since the turn of the 20th century. Texts were selected through a combination of sampling methods from extant textbook studies touching several eras encompassed by this study.…”

“…Half a century before Galtung and Ruge (1965) kicked off a spate of academic taxonomies of news values, US instructional journalism texts were codifying the key characteristics of people, events, and ideas that separated the newsworthy from the ignorable. Human interest is one of seven dominant news values that have been identified and defined in basic US journalism textbooks since the turn of the 20th century (Parks, 2018). The others are timeliness, prominence, proximity, consequence/impact, unusualness, and conflict.…”

Newsworthiness and story prominence: How the presence of news factors relates to upfront position and length of news stories

“…The lack of significant interaction effects can be explained journalistic organizations' tendency to 'de-differentiate' and to follow the dominant logic of the field to seek or maintain legitimation as a news source (Tandoc, 2018). Another explanation could be the similar kinds of training that journalists of the different outlets may receive (Parks, 2019). Hence, the objective of reader appeal is not only the ultimate production value of commercial outlets, but also for quality broadsheets (see Vandendaele, 2018), and the same news factors may be used to achieve this.…”

“…We adopt the framework of news factors that have repeatedly been found to be relevant in the North-European region (Eilders, 2006). This framework largely overlaps with the news factors identified in a research project across 63 countries (Masterton, 2005) and corresponds with the criteria for newsworthiness explicated by journalism textbooks over the past decades (Parks, 2019).…”

Toward a humanistic turn for a more ethical journalism

“…That we generally expect journalists to interpret significant events through this one epistemological filter is historically contingent (Bivins, 2014; Parks, 2019a) and fits into a broader epistemic social milieu of detached scientism that has been productively challenged within scientific discourse (e.g. Goodwin and Dahlstrom, 2014; Latour, 2004) in ways that have yet to substantively reach the journalistic field.…”