The Handbook of Journalism Studies

12. NEWS VALUES AND SELECTIVITY 171
• Preserve human dignity by providing suffi cient background information on people’s social,
cultural, economic and environmental contexts; highlight what people are doing for
themselves.
• Provide accounts by the people concerned rather than interpretations by a third party.
• Provide more frequent and more positive images of women.
• Avoid all forms of generalisation, stereotyping and discrimination. (NGO-EC Liaison
Committee, 1989)
Such an alternative approach to news values may operate at the margins of journalism—and,
indeed, may occupy a marginal position within journalism studies (Keeble, 2005)—but that does
not mean it has no signifi cance. Rather, it has been argued that the issues raised by the existence
of alternative media highlight important questions about “what news is, for whom it is intended,
and about whether mainstream news values serve the democratic participation and civic engagement
of citizens as well as they might” (Harcup, 2007, p. 56).
CONCLUSION
The concept of news values, then, can help us to understand the ways in which some phenomena
become identifi ed as “events” and the ways that some of those “events” are then selected to become
“news.” The concept of news values also helps us to explore the ways in which certain elements
of the selected “events” will be emphasised whilst others will be downplayed or excluded.
In this sense, discussion of news values sometimes blurs distinctions between news selection and
news treatment.
Defi nitions of news are not fi xed. Many lists of news values have been drawn up, and news
values can change over time, from place to place, and between different sectors of the news media.
For example, Galtung and Ruge put great emphasis on the “frequency” with which events
occur; yet, as technology changes many of the ways in which news is produced and received,
criteria such as “frequency” may become increasingly irrelevant in the world of continuous deadlines
required by the production of online and 24-hour news. For these news media, however,
“recency” (Golding & Elliot, 1979) and “competition” (Gans, 1980; Bell, 1991; Allern, 2002)
may become more dominant selection criteria, as well as the “type of audience” (Golding & Elliott,
1979; Gans, 1980; Allern, 2002) in an increasingly fragmented news market. This and other
perceived changes in news values suggest that the topic will remain a fruitful one for journalism
scholars for many years to come. For, whatever the technology and media involved—and
notwithstanding the growth of user-generated content, blogs, and online news aggregators—the
process of news journalism will still involve selection. And, although many journalists tend to
refer to the need for an instinctive “nose” for news selection, most academic researchers in the
fi eld would argue that it is probably not possible to examine news values in a meaningful way
without also paying attention to occupational routines, budgets, the market, and ideology, as well
as wider global cultural, economic and political considerations.
News values will continue to be subjected to scrutiny by academic researchers for the reasons
indicated above. Future research projects could usefully explore the impact of online journalism,
mobile telephony and podcasting on decisions about news selection and, indeed, on defi nitions
of news. Technological developments mean that news producers can now more accurately gauge
the relative popularity of particular stories online; the ways in which such knowledge may impact
upon news selection should be an area of increasing critical scrutiny. Many scholars are already
turning their attention to the role of so-called “citizen journalism” or “user-generated content”