News Values

Read Media Factsheet 76: News Values and complete the following questions/tasks. 

1) What example news story does the Factsheet use to illustrate Galtung and Ruge's News Values? Why is it an appropriate example of a news story likely to gain prominent coverage?

The daily mail asylum story "your right to worry". it is likely to gain coverage because it is relevant to the uk and features an interesting unique topic.

2) What is gatekeeping?

Gatekeeping is the process of filtering information

3) What are the six ways bias can be created in news?

through selection and omission, through placement, by headline, by photos/captions, and camera angles, through use of names and titles, by choice of words

4) How have online sources such as Twitter, bloggers or Wikileaks changed the way news is selected and published?

Its only agenda is to bring about ‘transparency’ and ‘freedom of speech’ and it offers a way for

audiences to access news stories that may have been mediated or censored prior to being reported.

5) In your opinion, how has the digital age changed Galtung and Ruge’s news values? 

The digital age has allowed for an wide and ever growing amount of opinions to be heard and shared. However overall many people's ideologies and approaches to opinions remain the constant.

6) How would you update these news values for the digital age? Choose TWO of Galtung and Ruge's news values and say how they have been affected by the growth of digital technology.

E.g. Immediacy is more important than ever due to news breaking on social media or elsewhere online. However, this in turn changes the approach of other news sources such as newspapers as the news will probably already be broken so different angles might be required. Newspapers now contain more comment or opinion rather than the breaking story.  

Continuity, as due to the growth of digital technology there are a multitude of sources making it harder to find clearly defined sources and the validity of the sources of information is hard to verify. Another one would be immediacy as now there is more competition from many different and expanding areas of the industry.