What Is News? Galtung and Ruge revisited

A general pattern in the construction of economic newsworthiness? Analyzing news factors in popular, quality, regional, and financial newspapers

“…Arguably, it is a general journalistic routine to follow up on topics that have received attention in the previous edition, also because this justifies the selection of it in the first instance (Harcup and O'Neill, 2001). Yet, for specialized reporting as that of financial newspapers, journalists are probably less likely to routinely report on the same issues as the day before, as they may have already moved on to new issues and developments to demonstrate the urgency of their outlet's coverage.…”

“…Most notably, Galtung and Ruge (1965) developed a taxonomy of news factors that would determine the probability of a foreign event to become news. However, reliably applying Galtung and Ruge's taxonomy of news factors turned out to be complicated (Harcup and O'Neill, 2001). Several of the news factors they identified are too open to subjective interpretation, which severely complicates reliable use in (quantitative) content analysis.…”

“…Stories about subjects already in the news (Harcup and O'Neill, 2001) For every article the main topic was coded out of a list of 58 potential topics (std λ = .75). Continuity is operationalized as the effect of the attention (number of articles) for a topic in one outlet on the attention for the same issue in the same outlet one day later.…”

Citizen Participation in News

“…Though they of course differ by news organisation, several lists have been compiled of the most common news values that are consistent across a particular region. Some of the most commonly used lists include the one by Harcup & O'Neill (2001) and, the list on which theirs is based, the one by Galtung & Ruge (1965). In this section we will use the news values proposed in these two lists as a means of analysing what occurred in the case studies, although it remains an open question as to how news values affect online news (Zubiaga 2013).…”

The theory of newsworthiness applied to Mexico's press. How the news factors influence foreign news coverage in a transitional country

“…In order to avoid known problems with measuring Galtung and Ruge's news factors (Harcup and O'Neill, 2001), the operationalizations of news factors suggested by Staab (1990) were used for this study. Based on Schulz's conceptualizations (1976Schulz's conceptualizations ( , 1982, Staab improved the measurability of news factors and provided detailed coding instructions.…”