Newsworthiness

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As an influencing factor, newsworthiness decides which news appears in the mass media , whether it is newsworthy , to what extent and in what presentation. The term comes from journalism and communication studies , especially news research .

Overview of the news value theory

The news value theory is a theory of news selection. Analyzes of media content measure characteristics of reported events. Together with the attributed news value ( e.g. scope, placement, presentation, etc. are used as indicators ), conclusions can be drawn about journalistic selection criteria. These allow forecasts for future reporting given the event characteristics (news factors).

The theoretical development of the news value theory suffered for a long time from the mixing of event characteristics and journalistic selection criteria. Although both variables shape the selection decision and the attributed news value, only the result, i.e. the media content, is examined (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Schulz, 1976; Staab, 1990). The work of journalists would be - probably unrealistic - a mere reflex on the event characteristics (causal model). Staab (1990) therefore concluded that the news value theory should not be so much a theory of news selection as one that describes the structures of media reality. If one accepts this position, however, the theory loses its original relevance, namely the explanation of journalistic selection decisions.

Kepplinger (1998) therefore called for a theoretical new beginning that should take greater account of the character of the two components in the news selection process (journalistic selection criteria and event characteristics). Since it is not possible to recognize journalistic selection criteria solely from the media content, the only possibility is to deduce them from the statistical connection ( correlation and regression ) of news values ​​and news factors (event characteristics). The indices determined in this way for the “news values ​​of the news factors” have a prognostic content for the prediction of future selection decisions (Kepplinger, 2000).

Beginnings of the news value theory

The first study on newsworthiness goes back to Walter Lippmann from 1922, who identified ten elements as follows:

  1. Surprise (oddity)
  2. Sensationalism
  3. Establishment
  4. Duration
  5. structure
  6. relevance
  7. damage
  8. Use
  9. Prominence (big names)
  10. Proximity (proximity, nearness)

Lippmann coined the term “news value” in the chapter The Nature of News . In it he presented journalistic ideas about the interests of the public and what is worth reporting.

The term can then be found primarily in the American research tradition. It sets up small newsworthy features of events and is mainly used in journalist training. These were able to replicate experimental studies well (the journalists had internalized them well), for example Warren (1934) mentions:

  1. News ,
  2. Proximity,
  3. Scope ( importance ),
  4. Celebrities ,
  5. Drama ,
  6. Oddity ,
  7. Conflict ,
  8. Sex ,
  9. Feelings ,
  10. Progress .

The European research tradition did not begin until the 1960s. Walther von La Roche refers to the American tradition in the first German-language journalism textbook, The Introduction to Practical Journalism . The Norwegian peace researchers Einar Östgaard (1965), Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) referred to the concept of newsworthiness established by Lippmann when they examined alleged distortions in the international flow of news . They stressed that the media is our only source of information when it comes to international events.

With this in mind, the researchers compiled catalogs of event characteristics that journalists consider particularly newsworthy: the news factors. While Östgaard's catalog was limited to just four factors (simplification, identification, sensationalism and threshold value), Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge significantly expanded the canon of newsworthy elements.

12 factors are already mentioned here. The first 8 factors are to be understood as "culture-independent" (valid in all cultures), the last 4 as "culture-dependent" (different depending on the culture).

Culture-independent factors:

  1. Frequency : The more the timing of an event corresponds to the publication period of the media, the more likely the event will become news.
  2. Threshold factor : the alertness that an event must exceed in order for it to be registered.
  3. Clarity : The clearer and more manageable an event is, the more likely it is to become a message.
  4. Significance ( importance or relevance ): The greater the scope of an event, the more it triggers personal concern, the more likely it is to become news.
  5. Consonance : The more an event agrees with existing ideas and expectations, the more likely it is to become news.
  6. Surprise : has the greatest chance of becoming news, but only if it surprises in line with expectations.
  7. Continuity : An event that is already defined as news has a high chance of continued media coverage.
  8. Variation: The threshold value for attention to an event is lower if it contributes to the balancing and variation of the entire news picture (see variant ).

Culture-dependent factors:

  1. Relation to elite nations : Events that affect elite nations have a disproportionately high news value.
  2. Relation to elite people : Events that affect elite people have a disproportionately high news value.
  3. Personalization : The more personalized an event is, the more it is represented in the actions or fate of people, the more likely it is to become news.
  4. Negativity : The more “negative” an event, the more it relates to conflict, controversy, aggression, destruction or death, the more the media will pay attention to it.

Galtung and Ruge develop their findings into a message theory based on perception psychology . According to their hypothesis, the news factors are additive , that is, the more news factors apply to an event, the more worthy of publication it is, and they are complementary : that is, the lack of one news factor can be compensated for by another. Galtung and Ruge only test their theory in relation to a few detailed hypotheses. Much more important than the empirical part of Galtung and Ruge's work, however, is the enormous theoretical fertility. The work is to be regarded as the starting point of a whole series of studies which deal with news value theory with reference to Galtung and Ruge (e.g. Sande, 1971). The considerations of Galtung and Ruge have been questioned critically.

For example, they (and later studies) pretend to measure event characteristics with their news factors. In fact, they are looking at media content. Furthermore, the theoretical derivation of the factors is rather weak. For example, not all factors, cf. Frequency or variation, to be justified (solely) by perceptual psychological influences. The operationalization is difficult due to the lack of independence of the factors. Winfried Schulz tackled these problems in 1976 (see next section).

Winfried Schulz, 1976: Theoretical reorientation

A fundamental expansion and theoretical reorientation achieved in 1976 the included constructivism . First, Schulz expanded the number of news factors to 18, which he divided into six dimensions. Graduations on four-stage scales also raised the scale level to a quasi-metric level.

The reorientation consisted in Schulz being the first to see the news factors not as characteristics of events, but as “journalistic hypotheses of reality”. This means that it is not the characteristics of an event that determine what the media publish (passive editor), but that the journalist or editor ascribes certain publication-worthy properties to an event and thus actively gives them news value through their selection. An event with the characteristics XY is therefore not published automatically. Only the editor (editorial line), the publisher, the advertising industry influence whether XY is suitable and interesting at this point in time or not. If the event with features XY remains unpublished, it still has features XY and might have been published at a different point in time.

Schulz systematized the following dimensions:

  1. time
    • Duration
    • Theming
  2. Proximity
    • spatial
    • politically
    • cultural
    • Relevance (degree of impact and existential significance of the event)
  3. status
    • regional and
    • national centrality (political and economic power and importance of the event region)
    • personal influence (political power of the people involved)
    • Prominence
  4. dynamics
    • surprise
    • Structure (complexity of the course form)
  5. valence
    • conflict
    • crime
    • damage
    • success
  6. ID
    • personalization
    • Ethnocentrism (to what extent does it affect the population of the country in which the medium appears)

Recent developments

Current studies assign journalists a much larger (instrumental) role in the construction of news. News factors are used, for example, to legitimize journalistic selection decisions (final model) by exaggerating event characteristics (explicitly) or specifically selecting them (implicitly). A functional news-value theory must take this characteristic into account.

See: Hans Mathias Kepplinger : Two-component model of the news value theory , and Joachim Friedrich Staab: Final model of news value research .

Furthermore, the question of news factors on the recipient side was re-posed: One tries to depict how the recipient's perception of the news value of a message influences the reception of the message. Eilders performs to that news factors in the reception pretend messages schemes of relevance and thus significantly impact the selective attention and information processing of the recipient.

For practical journalism , events have news value if they have news value and at the same time information value for readers, listeners and viewers . There are three information values:

  1. the knowledge and orientation value,
  2. the use value,
  3. the entertainment and conversation value.

Events that are newsworthy and informative are current .

It occasionally happens that news agencies note a few hours later, during a process for which they have announced a report, that this report is "not applicable due to lack of news value".

Digitization-related development

Due to the growing digitization, new challenges arise for news production. These include:

  1. Search engine optimization : Online content is designed in such a way that it can be found in the best possible way using search engines.
  2. Social media performance: Online articles are more likely to be read if they have a high number of likes, shares and comments on social media.
  3. Financing concept: The online news content can be roughly divided into free and chargeable content according to its financing concept. For free content, media organizations pay more attention to the fact that they generate as much traffic as possible via search engine optimization , while paid content is designed to be valuable and resource-intensive.

Special case: international news flow

An offshoot of newsworthiness research looks at the conditions of international news flow. The question is, from which countries which events are reported in national media. The question of whether the flow of news is distorted and thus contributing to imbalances in the international power structure was discussed intensely, especially between 1975 and 1985. In the course of the supposed globalization of the media, it has gained new attention since the late 1990s. The latest research results indicate that - contrary to what has been assumed in the meantime - the status of a country does not play the decisive role for international reporting. Rather, the event itself has greater significance.

See also

literature

  • Walter Lippmann : Public opinion . Munich 1964, ISBN 3883397865 (original edition; Public Opinion . New York 1922).
  • Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge : The Structure of Foreign News. The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crisis in Four Norwegian Newspapers . In: Journal of Peace Research 2 (1965), pp. 64-91.
  • Winfried Schulz : The construction of reality in the news media . Freiburg / Munich 1976, ISBN 3495473319 .
  • Hans Mathias Kepplinger : The news value of news factors. In: Holtz-Bacha, Scherer, Waldmann (ed.): How the media create the world and how people live in it . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen / Wiesbaden 1998, pp. 19–38.
  • Hans Mathias Kepplinger and Bastian Rouwen: The prognostic content of the news value theory . In: Publizistik 45 (4), 2000, pp. 462–475.
  • Dietz Schwiesau and Josef Ohler: The news in the press, radio, television, news agency and internet. A Manual for Education and Practice. Munich 2003.
  • Dietz Schwiesau, Josef Ohler: News - classic and multimedia. A Manual for Education and Practice. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016.
  • Staab, Joachim Friedrich : News value theory: formal structure and empirical content . Freiburg (Breisgau), Munich: Alber (Alber brochure communication, vol. 17), 1990.
  • Christiane Eilders : News Factors and Reception: An Empirical Analysis of the Selection and Processing of Political Information . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1997.
  • Östgaard, Einar : Factors Influencing the Flow of News. In: Journal of Peace Research 2 (1965), pp. 39-63.
  • Georg Ruhrmann, Jens Woelke, Michaela Maier and Nicole Diehlmann: The value of news on German television. A model for validating news factors . Opladen 2003.
  • Michaela Maier, Karin Stengel and Joachim Marschall: News Value Theory . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2010, ISBN 9783832-94266-3 .
  • Patrick Weber: News Factors & User Generated Content: The importance of news factors for commenting on political reporting on news websites . In: Medien & Kommunikationwissenschaft, 2012, 60 (2), pp. 218–239 ( [1] ).
  • Rene Mono and Helmut Scherer : Whoever counts the dead names the places. Is the international message flow determined by country factors or event characteristics? In: Publizistik, 2/2012, pp. 135–159 ( doi: 10.1007 / s11616-012-0145-x ).

Web links

Wiktionary: news value  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lippmann Walter: Public Opinion (1922), German: The public opinion, Bochum: Brockmeyer 1990.
  2. ↑ Galtung / Ruge (p. 71): "Additivity hypothesis: The higher the total score of an event, the higher the probability that it will become news, and even make headlines."
  3. ↑ See: Christiane Eilders: News Factors and Reception.
  4. ^ Dietz Schwiesau, Josef Ohler: News - classic and multimedia. A Manual for Education and Practice. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016
  5. ↑ http://www.op-online.de/region/frankfurt/kommentar-feldmanns-starkes-signal-roemer-laedt-regional-debatte-3844514.html
  6. ↑ Markus Appel, Marc Roder: News factors: What is it worth reporting about? In: Markus Appel (ed.): The psychology of the post-factual: About fake news, "Lügenpresse", Clickbait & Co. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg 2020, ISBN 978-3-662-58695-2 , p. 33–43 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-662-58695-2_4 (DOI = 10.1007 / 978-3-662-58695-2_4 [accessed March 21, 2020]).
  7. ↑ Ines Engelmann, Manuel Wendelin: Comment counts or news factors or both? Influences on news website users 'news selectioners' news selection . No. 11 . International Journal of Communication, S. 2501-2519 .
  8. ↑ Light Sjøvaag: Introducing the paywall . In: Journalism Practice . tape 10 , no. 3 , April 2, 2016, ISSN  1751-2786 , p. 304–322 , doi : 10.1080 / 17512786.2015.1017595 (DOI = 10.1080 / 17512786.2015.1017595 [accessed on March 21, 2020]).