News values and the multisemiotic news story

Abstract

As events unfold in the real world, some of them will be reported in the news media and some of them will not. What takes an event into the news has been described by Galtung and Ruge (1965) as a threshold which an event has to cross before it will be registered as news. This threshold has been theorized in Media Studies as ‘news values’. As Bednarek (2006, p. 18, italics in original) points out: ‘[n]ews values explain what makes news. They are of great importance in deciding what gets covered and how it gets covered, i.e. concerning the selection and presentation of news stories.’ Brighton and Foy (2007, p. 1) also state that news values ‘… give journalists and editors a set of rules — often intangible, informal, almost unconscious elements — by which to work, from which to plan and execute the content of a publication or broadcast.’ Such views are also supported through recent ethnographic research, which suggests that news values ‘govern each stage of the reporting and editing process’ (Cotter 2010, p. 73). Prevalent in most research is an emphasis on news values as codes, rules, criteria or beliefs held and applied by news professionals. Also prevalent in the research on news values is the primary focus on news values in relation to words rather than photographs. However, news photography has also been shown to relate to news values (Hall 1981; Craig 1994; Caple 2009b; Bednarek and Caple 2012a).