Ever since Galtung and Ruge (1965) published their seminal study on news values, the topic has not been out of focus in journalism studies. Harcup and O’Neill added influential contributions in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Harcup and O’Neill 2001; O’Neill and Harcup 2009), which they updated in the second decade (Harcup and O’Neill 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2020) and recently we witnessed a complementary interest from discourse studies and corpus linguistics (e.g. Bednarek and Caple 2017).
News values play an important role in the news selection process. Studies in journalism have constantly been revisiting and redefining the criteria for news selection, but they mostly start either from the point of view of the journalist or from the analysis of the journalistic texts and/or visuals delivered. However, in the academic thinking about journalism, an audience turn (after the linguistic turn and the narrative turn) has taken place. User-based approaches to journalism have been introduced (see among others Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2016), focusing on production (e.g. investigating the involvement of the audience in the journalistic creation process) as well as on consumption (e.g. measuring clicking patterns in online news processing).
Combining the study of news values with the audience turn offers new perspectives, which we want to explore in this book. The role of the audience in the news selection process, not only as the ‘projected’ news consumer in the heads of journalists and/or editors-in-chief but also as the active and reactive transmitter of news or as the interactive factor in the measurement of online responses and click through rates, has not been studied extensively from a news values angle yet. The impact of the audience on what becomes news and the changes in news values caused by the audience are the core topics of the contributions in this volume.
Of course, we have also reflected on the audience we envisaged ourselves with this book volume. We wanted it to be as broad as possible, which is why we have asked our authors to step down from the mere academic register they write in most of the time and to make their insights as accessible as possible, for the non-specialist reader as well.
This book is divided in three parts. Part I gives an overview of how thinking about news values has evolved over the last 50 years. Critical notes are added on the applicability of news value theory and on the importance of a proper news selection for a vital civil society. Additionally, in order to put news values in a broader, global perspective, news consumers’ preferences and behaviour are discussed based on a survey conducted in 15 countries worldwide.
Tony Harcup , one of the ‘founding parents’ of the study of news values, has written Chap. 2 for this volume. He offers a very personal account of how his conceptions of news and the audience have evolved since the 1960s until now. In his career, he has always approached news values from the perspective of the journalist or the scholar. Together with Deirdre O’Neill, he published influential papers on the forces that determine what becomes news (Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2009, 2020). He now switches his viewpoint to that of a member of the news audience (who has unavoidably at the same time processed numerous empirical studies of the factors that determine what is news), who wants to add some critical thinking about what news could be.
His point is that news helps in creating a potential for the audience to become active citizens and that it is therefore primordial to always have the audience in mind when working as a journalist. He draws on the notion of ‘imaginative empathy’ (Berger 1975) to argue that, if news stories appeal to this sentiment, the audience will develop a capacity of solidarity and overcome immature reflexes like interpreting the world in terms of us-them oppositions. This does not mean that news stories should be tear-jerking and emotional but that journalists should be able to sketch balanced representations by ‘listening actively’ (Robinson 2011) to the people involved.
Harcup goes on to say that active listening creates a dialogic relationship between journalists and their audience(s). Enhancing the imaginative empathy simultaneously reduces stereotyping and distortion and creates ‘emotional proximization’ (Kopytowska 2015).
After about 40 years of thinking about journalism, Harcup feels entitled to define what ‘good journalism’ is and for him, trying to fight apathy and to inspire the audience to take action is key to this definition. Recognising and recording the agency of the audience means that journalists provide enough context so that relations and proportions become clear; that they ask questions about the structural forces in society and that they reflect on how the news affects the bulk of the population, rather than the ‘Great Men or Women’.
For Harcup, the agency of the audience still only becomes part of the news production process through the agency of the journalist. For other authors, the agency of the audience is a more independent force, which can influence and steer the production and distribution of news in its own right. This is explained in the next chapter.
Chapter 3 is a theoretical one, in which Steve Paulussen and Peter Van Aelst give an account of the study of news values since Galtung and Ruge (1965) till the present day and discuss the question which research topics should be addressed and which methods should be used to establish the relationship between news values and the audience. This chapter provides the bigger scope for the central topic of this volume. It tries to finetune the concept of news values, which is used by many different authors in many different ways and elaborates on the changes brought about by digital journalism and more specifically on the way audience analytics affect the construction of news(worthiness).
According to Paulussen and Van Aelst, there are two models of thinking about news values and three approaches to study them: on the one hand there is the causal model that considers events and utterances to possess inherent qualities or ‘news factors’ (Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006) which are then selected by journalists on the basis of a consensus about the significance of these qualities. It is this consensus that determines the news value. The functional model on the other hand is routine-related and considers news values to be the outcome of the pragmatics of journalistic production routines.
Both models can be found in studies on the gatekeeping or selection approach to news values, which try to answer the question why certain topics are selected for the news and others are not.
Another possible approach is the discursive approach. All studies in this domain adhere to the functional model and focus on how the news is presented, which angles and frames are applied and to which distortions of the facts these choices can lead. News values in this approach can be seen as the ‘pegs’ to hang the news on.
A third approach is the replication approach, which is interested in the way the representation of the news is echoed in society and the public domain. This approach applies the causal model and considers news values to be cognitive clues that attract people’s attention. Especially in an age of information abundance, cognitive clues are important structuring devices.
With the advent of digital and social media, direct and indirect influences of the audience on the gatekeeping process and on the construction of news and newsworthiness have become more visible and important. While the presence of the audience in the back of journalists’ minds was already recognised in the routine-related functional model, the independent role of news consumers as secondary gatekeepers is now a new domain of study. By clicking, liking, sharing and commenting, the audience influences the production and distribution of news and these processes deserve scholarly attention. These new evolutions will be discussed in depth in Chap. 5.
Also, future research on news values might focus on the cognitive cues and try to find out which news values the audience applies for making a selection from the constant stream of information, for sharing this information and for assessing it. Taken one step further, these news cues could be detected automatically and news bots and social media algorithms could produce news tailored to the wishes of the audience.
When thinking about the future of journalism, Paulussen and Van Aelst plead in favour of a thorough examination of what kind of news values should be reproduced in automated journalism and what kind of news gatekeepers we want machines to be. For them, audience-oriented journalism should not be equated to commercial or market-driven journalism and should not reduce audiences to their consumer role.
Chapter 4 puts the topic of news values and the audience in a global perspective. Jeffrey Wilkinson, August Grant, Yicheng Zhu and Diane Guerrazzi point out that news values have been studied extensively by Western researchers, but that relatively little attention has been paid to news consumers’ behaviour around the world.
The authors confirm what was contended in the previous chapter, that is there has been a transformation of news consumers from passive receivers to active seekers and contributors and they...