PART 1 Chapter 2 A SOCIAL PHENOMENON
2.4 THE MAIN FEATURES OF TABLOID NEWSPAPERS
2.4.4 What is news?
A dull old Sunday today so I sat in front of the box watching Newcastle, incredibly, trash Manchester United 5-0. It was stunning to watch, and when I called in to the offce it was all they were talking about. 'Let's splash it,' I said. 'Erm, we can't do that, it's just a football match,' was the universal response. 'Yes, but it's news, we're all amazed, so the public will all be amazed too.' Most people thought I'd taken leave of my senses but we did it anyway under the headline '5-0'. Sales of the Mirror rose by 50 000 copies. A quarter of this increase was in Liverpool alone, where apparently it has become a collector's item... Rather like with Ian Beale, there's a lot to be said for front pages depicting unpopular institutions getting their comeuppance.
This account illustrates that Charles A. Dana, a former editor of the New York Sun, explained this accurately when he stated: “News is anything that will make people talk” (Leiter et al., 2000:30). Yet, De Beer (1977:24–37) points out that journalists often struggle to defend or even motivate their decisions in selecting certain stories, as this account illustrates. He, however, states that while they are unable to do this, they most probably, at an unconscious level, evaluate stories with reference to the traditional news criteria, which are closely linked to topics (see table 2.2; section 2.3.2.1). Journalists probably, he argues, unconsciously learn and internalise the criteria that determine the newsworthiness of a story. Despite not consciously using the traditional news criteria, Morgan (like any other journalist working in a newsroom) knows that the unusual, the miracle and confict (especially when a prominent person or institution is involved) sell newspapers. He also, unconsciously, knows that the more news criteria one can attribute to a story, the more newsworthy the story becomes (see Oosthuizen, 2004:454).
The traditional news criteria include timeliness, proximity, prominence, confict, impact and novelty (the emotional or unusual; Burton, 2010:232; De Beer & Botha, 2008:234; O'Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2008:27; Oosthuizen, 2004:454; Doig & Doig, 1972:9). Sex and natural tragedies are also included in the list of news criteria and human-interest stories, and the tragic and bizarre are considered newsworthy too (Doig & Doig, 1972:9). Timeliness, proximity, prominence and impact could be seen as factors that determine the newsworthiness of a story (De Beer, 1977:35). De Beer (1977:40) explored two of these factors, proximity and impact (or intensity), as dimensions of news that represent different news criteria (see De Beer & Botha, 2008:234, 235; De Beer, 2004:169–71; Oosthuizen, 2004:454; Leiter et al., 2000:31; Randall, 2000:24–8; Greer, 1999:37, 38):
Proximity/Distance
Time Place Socio-psychic
New information is news and the more recent it is, the newsworthier.
The closer news happens to where people live or work, the more newsworthy it is. For this reason, a story about a local murder would be considered more important, as was the case with the Welkom murder in which two young people allegedly murdered a young man in a graveyard. Although the story was splashed on front pages all over the country, it got particular attention in the local newspapers, as well as the daily Volksblad, which is distributed in this area.
Here, De Beer (1977:40) lists various factors that contribute to a story’s proximity in terms of a socio-psychic dimension. When stories are interesting, hold personal appeal, are useful and elicit emotion, and when readers can identify with the characters or story, the story becomes relevant to them. It is for this reason, that the Welkom murder received a great deal of attention from Afrikaans newspapers, yet did not appear on the front pages of English or black-audience newspapers.
Intensity
Status quo Extent Unusualness
When stories involve prominent people or institutions, have consequences, involve confict of any nature or have an impact on the status quo, they are
considered more newsworthy – especially if one or more of these criteria are involved.
Confict is of relevance, since it often disrupts the status quo.
The magnitude of a news event adds to its intensity and therefore its newsworthiness.
Stories that are unexpected, strange or unusual add to the intensity of the news event and therefore are more newsworthy.
Table 2.1: How proximity and intensity infuence the selection of news stories
However, it is important to note that news, and accordingly newsworthiness, differs from place to place, newspaper to newspaper, and community to community, warns Greer (1999:31). It is for this reason that one group of readers (or critics) cannot decide or judge what news is or should be for a particular reading community (see section 2.4.7). Tabloid newspapers are characterised by human- interest stories, confict, sex and the unusual. Human-interest stories in particular, which fall under under socio-psychic in the proximity dimension, characterise tabloid newspapers (see Burton, 2010:233; section 2.3.2.1). De Beer (1977:43), however, warns that these criteria do not only apply to stories about people and animals – or even stories that appeal to readers in an emotional sense.
Moreover, these stories need not be signifcant to readers – but they could be, particularly when readers fnd them useful or gain reward from them. The timeliness, proximity and prominence criteria are not usually relevant when a story has great human-interest appeal – in fact, Leiter et al. (2000:36-7) argue that stories that do not adhere to these news criteria are likely to be human-interest stories. They
also point out that human-interest stories border on novelty stories, which report weird and wonderful news, such as a girl who trained her cow to jump hurdles (see section 3.3.1[b]) and a cat that purrs at 90 decibels for the most part of the day (Feeraider, 2011; Phillips, 2011:52) – their substance is what distinguishes human-interest stories from novelties (Leiter et al., 2000:37; see De Beer, 1977:44, 45).
Human-interest stories are therefore interesting stories with emotional appeal that the reader could fnd either signifcant or useful. Whereas prominent people and institutions receive much attention in more mainstream papers and supermarket tabloids, readings of the South African tabloids suggest that ordinary people with extraordinary stories that appeal to readers at an emotional level receive much more attention (see sections 2.3.2.1 and 2.3.2.6; see Leiter et al., 2000:34, 35). Du Plessis (2011) confrms this notion when he states that one can fnd ordinary people on the front pages of the Daily Sun (see Bloom, 2005:17–9). Accordingly, the value of these stories does not lie in their impact or consequence, but rather in the sympathetic interest they elicit from the reader (De Beer, 1977:44).
Certain tabloids therefore appear to put their readers, rather than celebrities or prominent people, in the spotlight. It could be argued that this brings the news closer to its readers at a socio-psychic level, for not only could readers identify with the characters in these stories, but they could also fnd the information more useful (see chapter 6; section 6.3.1.1).
As stated above, confict provides great content for tabloid newspapers, especially if it is of a human- interest nature and paired with other news criteria. Confict manifests in physical confict, wars, murder, disputes between people, institutions, sport teams, political parties – and confict between citizens and government. In other words, political, economic, social and scientifc confict is also considered newsworthy and usually interest readers. Conficts of a disruptive nature would almost surely appear on front page, state Leiter et al. (2000:31).
Sex is another staple of tabloid newspapers (see Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001:152; section 3.3.1.2).
Some tabloid editors appear to make no secret of this, blatantly promoting their newspapers by emphasising the sexual content (Bellingan, 2009:8; see footnote 5). Journalist Maretta Bellingan (2009:8) makes it clear that sex and sleaze sell newspapers: “Die nuusredakteur van 'n Sondagkoerant het eendag die vraag van 'n joernalis wat wou weet watter tipe stories die beste verkoop, met drie woorde geantwoord: snot, sport en semen.”6 Leiter et al. (2000:37) hold that most editors regard sex as a news criterion – and more so when it is associated with a prominent public fgure. When coupled with other criteria such as confict and proximity, sex appears to satisfy readers' hunger for interesting information. Prominent examples of this in the Afrikaans South African context are the recent sex video in which Springbok rugby player Joost van der Westhuizen appeared with a stripper, the alleged affair between late AWB
6 [The news editor of a Sunday newspaper once answered a journalist who wanted to know which stories sell best, with three words: Snot, sex and semen.]
leader Eugene Terre'Blanche and the journalist Jani Allan, singer Robby Klay who accused the Afrikaans sweetheart Jurie Els of sexually harassing him, as well as the love-triangle in which former president F.W. de Klerk was involved, which ultimately resulted in a divorce from his wife, Marike.
The story was revived in some form when Marike was murdered in her home a few years later. Stories like these make readers pick up a newspaper to read the follow-up and the latest details.
In the developing South Africa, development news that includes stories on HIV/Aids is also considered newsworthy. Newsworthiness is often considered to be intrinsic to a story, but Bird and Dardenne (in Johansson, 2009:92) suggest that news criteria are cultural codes (see Oosthuizen, 2004:455). The value of a news item will therefore vary between newspapers and cultural groups:
HIV/Aids is, for example, newsworthy in South Africa, whereas the Royal Family makes the front page in Europe. Tabloids redefne the concept of “news”, for they address issues that are related to their target audiences (see Bird, 2003a:72; Allan, 2010:126, 127; Greer, 1999:36) and this underlines Greer (1999:36) regarding the qualities news should have: by studying the topics on which tabloid newspapers focus (see section 2.3.2.1), it could be concluded that the focus of tabloids is not necessarily on timeliness, impact or proximity, but rather confict, prominence and novelty, in other words sex, crime, human-interest stories and the bizarre. Regardless of what a newspaper considers to be news, news must be new, and it should have conversational and commercial value. Thus, if a newspaper sells, it most probably has these news qualities. Therefore, establishing the news criteria on which the Son focuses will provide insight into what the newspaper believes to be interesting, important and relevant to its specifc reader community (see Johansson, 2007:92).