2.2 Newsworthiness
2.2.1 Key contributors and their contributions
To discern between those news events that are deemed noteworthy by the media and those that will fail to generate interest from the media, Galtung and Ruge (1965) describe fourteen values (or characteristics) that a news event must demonstrate before it will receive attention from the media.
These values are the following:
• Frequency: which refers to events that occur suddenly and fit well with the news organisation's schedule;
• Familiarity: which deals with people or places close to the audience’s home;
• Negativity: which refers to bad news being more newsworthy than good news;
• Unexpectedness: where an event is out of the ordinary;
• Unambiguity: which refers to events whose implications are clear and make for better copy than those that are open to more than one interpretation. It is this value of ‘unambiguity’ that evoked some disagreement from other scholars. In their critical review of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) thesis, Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy (2007) argue that ‘clarity’ is undefined and could cause minority groups to become excluded due to uncertainty and anxiety.
• Personalisation: where events considered as ‘human interest’ will receive more audience attention than those that involve inanimate objects;
• Meaningfulness: which relates to the sense of empathic identification the audience has with the topic;
• Cultural approximation: stories involving people who look, work, act and speak the same will receive more coverage than those concerned with people who are different. This news value might be of more importance if the research concerned the agenda setting function of online media. However, for the current research, the cultural approximation value will merely serve as a raison d’etre of the report.
• Elite nations: this term refers to events and stories concerned with global powers and news flowing from central areas;
• Elite persons: events or stories concerned with the rich, famous, powerful and infamous;
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• Conflict: where the opposition of forces or people results in a dramatic effect;
• Consonance: where the stories that fit with media expectations receive more coverage than those that defy them;
• Continuity: which refers to an event that is already in the news; and
• Composition: where events must compete with one another for space in the media. For example, it refers to the need to establish a balance between sport, entertainment and hard news stories (Galtung & Ruge, 1965).
Based these news values journalists, academics and theorists have contributed other principles and thus created an evolving understanding of why news media select certain events, people and stories to report on. These academics include Phillip Schlesinger’s (1987) article that proposes time constraints, which refers to the need for traditional news media such as radio, daily newspapers and televised news reports to adhere to strict deadlines as they have a short production cycle. Another value or characteristic logistics, which is the ability to deploy and control production and reporting staff and ensure the functionality of technical resources that can determine whether a story is covered.
Another contributor to news values is Allan Bell (1991: 27) who, in his The language of news media, adds the following values:
• Competition: which refers to commercial or professional competition between media that may lead reporters to endorse the news value given to a story by a rival news agency;
• Co-optation: which refers to a story that is only marginally newsworthy in its own right, but may be covered if it is related to a major running story;
• Prefabrication: where an event that is marginal in news terms may be written ahead of a much more newsworthy story;
• Predictability: which is similar to ‘clarity’, where an event is more likely to be covered if it has been pre-scheduled; and
• Data: where the news media need to back up all of their stories with data in order to remain relevant and reliable.
Even though the list of news values changes and evolves with the dereliction of certain news media, such as the diminishing circulation of daily newspapers (Wijesiri, 2019), there is an increase in rolling news media such as online news platforms (Byerly, 2018). However, the foundation for news selection criteria has remained relatively entrenched in the works of Galtung and Ruge in the Twentieth Century (Brighton & Foy, 2007). In News values, Brighton and Foy (2007) critically deconstruct the epistemological and axiological assumptions of Galtung and Ruge (1965) to identify how their work may contribute to more contemporary investigations. According to Brighton and Foy (2007), previous
50 accounts of news values tend to be of two kinds. The first examines news stories from the perspective of the journalist working in the industry, while the second attempts to take a broader approach by incorporating areas such as ideology, cultural conditioning, technological determinism, and others.
Brighton and Foy (2007) also argue that a third approach is needed in conjunction with these two existing schools of thought because of changes within individual media – online media platforms allow for different opportunities and restrictions to those of print media – and because of “a shift in the nature of the relationships between reporters and consumers of news, especially online”.
Returning to the purpose of Newsworthiness, Galtung and Ruge (1965) hypothesise that it is important to uncover the selection of news items rooted in social science studies rather than in the intrinsic value of the event as the determinant of news. As a result, Newsworthiness has a decidedly Marxist principle (Brighton & Foy, 2007). Brighton and Foy (2007) also criticise the methodological assumptions of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) work as they argue that their thesis resulted from observations of a narrow range of newspaper publications in Norway while growing online news consumption and global influences necessitate major revisions and a broader observational scope. Wijsiri (2019) argues that there is a growing expectation that newspapers will develop their websites to become the first point of reference where news will go straight to the website, which has a global implication as it is instantly accessible to readers without them having to wait for the next edition of the newspaper.
Another key contributor to the discussions about the future of news reporting is Dietmar Schantin (2017) who explains that it is not sufficient to run the same content in both editions – or Wijsiri (2019) predicting that online content will replace that of traditional media – as there is an economic imperative to generate a workable model and failure to do so will result in falling circulation and eventually the failure of the entire publication. Here, in line with the philosophy of Michel Foucault, Brighton and Foy (2007) note that many reporters online do not get paid for their investments of time and effort when writing about LGBTIQ issues when they use outside established news outlets. A key concern regarding funding for these online sites is that they may rely on ‘Likes’ and ‘Clicks’ to attract advertising revenue and that this motivation might result in the representation of sexualities. In an ironic twist, it is the insular nature of web-based media that allows reporting to promote the interests of activist groups. A key question would be whether these advocacy and pressure groups utilise online media as much as news outlets do insofar the reporting on ‘queercide’ is concerned. Online media platforms can provide an easy route to ‘power for minority’ interest groups (Jewkes, 2004) on websites that are endowed with a disproportionate sense of power. The current research, as a critical study, involved an investigation of the phenomenon of narrow interest in amateur web media as a channel for how LGBTIQ interests are framed. Another concern was that the LGBTIQ community might feel the need to bypass established channels of paid media and democratic process in what could be described as the Fifth Estate.
51 Based on the critical review of Brighton and Foy’s (2007) work, it is argued that, in order for Galtung and Ruge (1965) − and more contemporary theorists of Newsworthiness − to become more open and valid for news in the Twenty-First Century and in order to add heuristic value to the study of online reports on ‘queercide’, the works of Jewkes (2004) and Harcup and O’Neil (2010) need to be considered. Of these works, some “...are more concerned with the subjects of, and actors within, the story, such as ‘power élite’ and ‘celebrity’, while others are more conceptual, such as ‘relevance’, and yet others are accounts of media practice, including ‘follow-ups’ and ‘media agenda’” (Harcup &
O’Neil, 2010: 75). For these reasons the research proposes that authors such as Collins and James (2011), Meissner (2015) and Grundlingh (2017) have to be involved in the pursuit of moving Newsworthiness into the Twenty-First Century.
2.2.2 Important criticisms of Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) Newsworthiness as a Twenty-First