What is so essential about news?

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Just like most of the reporters and editors I know, I never went to journalism school. Absurdly, I'm now on the faculty at a journalism school. Through sitting in on the classes of my colleagues only now being exposed to some foundational reporting and news conventions.

Learning the conventions is, I suppose, kind of the point of school. Still, I find much of journalism's orthodoxy frustrating, especially in this setting where young people are spending their money and idealism. These conventions don't always serve audiences. Fewer than half of people surveyed by the Pew Research Center in May said the news failed to meet the low bar of making them “feel informed” often. It seems like all of us, in newsrooms and journalism schools, should be challenging everything we know right now and then changing what doesn't check out.

Nowhere is the need for change more clear than in “news values.” Also called newsworthiness, these criteria: impact, emotion, conflict, timeliness, proximity, prominence, and novelty, have come up in two classes so far. These values were questioned in one class I attended, even as they were offered as an acceptable standard for coverage decisions. In the other class, they were presented as canonical.

You guys! What are we even doing!?!

I've been skeptical about news judgment decisions since my earliest days in journalism. But I didn't know about these criteria. Or that they are the result of a back-and-forth between academia and industry. Academics in the 1960's first analyzed news content to develop a taxonomy of factors they could understand as driving the coverage. One of those researchers, Johan Galtung, said later in his life that his work was not meant to be instructive but critical. “Our work from the early 1960s was meant to be a warning of the consequences for the way news media filtered the world,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “But the western news industry believed I was describing how things should be done, instead of what is being done.” Galtung, for his part, stopped speaking to the media for decades while his list became a standard component of J-school curricula.

I had no idea. Now, I belatedly understand why pushing for an information-gap or community needs-based approach to coverage decisions could be seen as radical instead of practical (it's still the later).

I don't want to overstate the impact of these particular news values being codified and reinforced in academia. I know I'm not the only skilled reporter and editor oblivious to these criteria. In fact, one study (if you have trouble accessing these, I'm happy to email you a copy) found that even journalists who are explicitly taught news values forget them and then find it hard to articulate what drives their own coverage decisions.

But this view of news and its purpose can also travel further afield, being recently held up as audience-serving by NPR's Public Editor earlier this year.

I don't think we need consensus when it comes to news values, but I do think we need better ones. These values or criteria should be more about what any particular piece of news can do for a person or a community and less about how it might attract attention.

I have my own list of essential news functions from a few years ago. They are overdue for more interrogation, and that will be coming in the next few weeks. The 2020 version was: record creation, record correction, filling information gaps, accountability, narrative shift, and community connection. I encourage you to come up with your own list, and I would love to see it. 

I have some questions for us as we work through this:

• What values do you want to see drive the news?
• Are these values different from the functions you want news to have in the world? What functions do you want your news to have?
• Do you think it's important the audience know and understand what drives coverage? How would you tell them? 

What I'm reading

A large handful of studies about news values, most of which are linked here. I'm also listening to Wesley Morris interview Nikole Hannah-Jones on Morris’ Cannonball podcast. These two are some of the best to ever do it, and this conversation is a gift. It is also incredibly relevant to questions about news judgment. Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project made me think that a core function of news needed to be record correction. In this conversation, she talks about the ripple effects of reporting that can undermine popular but inaccurate narratives. It is an honest conversation about the power reporting can have, the blowback it can bring, and the role of dissent.

One question for you

First, a confession. I continue to feel a little uncomfortable in this blog/missive/dispatch form. I chose this form to explore ideas that are not fully formed and in flux, but I want to know if it feels too underbaked. Would you prefer if these writings came less frequently but were more fully reported? Would more viewpoints, on the record, be helpful? Please let me know, and I'll take it under advisement. I would appreciate the feedback.

Have a great week. I'll be back with more on values next Tuesday.