NEWS VALUES and NEWSWORTHINESS

How are crime stories selected?Through NEWS VALUES – a set of criteria which editors and journalists use to decide if a story is NEWSWORTHY (worth putting into the news)

Key news values influencing the selection of crime stories:1. Immediacy2. Dramatisation: action and excitement3. Personalisation: human interest stories about individuals4. Higher-status: persons and celebrities5. Simplification: eliminating shades of grey/ clear good and evil,

‘innocent victim’/wicked perpetrator’ extreme

6. Novelty or unexpectedness: a new angle7. Risk: victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear8. Violence: especially visible and spectacular acts

Contemporary crime story examples: Crime News story News values involved?a)

b)

c)

d)

Gatekeepers include news editors, owners of newspapers and journalists and reporters. They decide just which news stories are going to feature in the news. Crime stories are very attractive to gatekeepers, they are very good for selling papers and enabling publications to hold or even increase their share of the market.

The distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects the fact that the news is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONNews does not simply exist out there waiting to be gathered in and written up by the journalist. It is a social construct – the outcome of a social process in which only stories that make people buy newspapers will be printed – all the time stories are being considered - then some are selected, some are rejected.As Cohen & Young (1973) argued news is not discovered but MANUFACTURED