Wednesday, 11 November 2009

Mini Essay #2 - Issues/Debates

...News Values...

Reports, which are interesting and newsworthy, are distinguished by a broadly agreed set of characteristics called ‘’news values’’. News values are general guidelines or criteria that determine the worth of a news story and how much prominence it is given by newspapers or broadcast media. They are fundamental to understanding news production and the choices that editors and other journalists face when deciding that one bit of information is news while another is not. They were first developed by media researchers Galtung and Ruge. They analysed international news stories in order to find out what factors they had in common, and what placed them at the top of the news system. They wanted to see if whether the stories published in newspapers could offer their readers anything and if whether the stories were newsworthy. They identified a range of values which are able to put into perspective what makes a story news worthy and what gives it the special privilege of being published within a newspaper. The impact, audience identification, and pragmatics of media coverage is what allows for a story to be newsworthy as it encompasses all the qualities which allow it to go a step above all others. For example, personalisation, and meaningfulness are able to establish the ways in which readers are able to identify which the stories published in newspapers. Audiences, on the whole, tend to regard the news as reliable, as coming from an authoritative, largely impartial source. They therefore tend to trust the information they receive as news, and believe it to be "true".

News values will be a current issue/debate of which I will be able to look into when carrying out research on my critical investigation. This can be applied to my research topic as it puts into perspective what newspapers or news reports can offer their readers and audience as a result of some being more important than others and thus having a more important role within the print media platform. This is important when thinking about whether or not the representations in film are true and if whether they can show any relation to people's actions in today's society.

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