News Values, Authors: Paul Brighton & Dennis Foy, Book Review by Johnson Thomas

Book Title: News Values
Authors: Paul Brighton & Dennis Foy
Sage Publications
Paperback, 205 pages, 18.99 Pounds
Sage Publications, ISBN 978-1-4129-4600-1
www.sagepublications.com


What are News Values? Is there any specific criteria for selecting news? Does celebrity news warrant more bytes than that of problems faced by the common man? These are questions that have troubled me for a long time. In fact ever since liberalization happened and news became a commodity to be sold and purchased just like any other. It’s a deplorable trend but with a large number of Media players in the market and a distinct dearth in creativity and social understanding it is something that was just waiting to happen…especially in India. In the purest sense everything that happens in the world is a new event and it’s eminently likely that someone , somewhere will have some level of interest in that occurrence. But what takes it from being different to being news? The approach to the delivery and packaging of news has altered with the passage of time, and the shape of the media in the 21st century is quite different from how it was 40 years ago.
The set of values applied by different media are also as varied as the media themselves. Therefore some form of a matrix system was needed to prioritise those events , to filter them into levels of applicability and relevance to the audience. Johan Galtung and Mari Homboe Ruge’s paper titled ‘Structuring and selecting news’ was the groundbreaking research paper that has become the core text for the purpose of evaluating ‘news values’. The current book under review is basically an expanded and more extensive in-depth version of that core text. Galtung and Ruge concentrated solely on Normay for their data analysis and this works against their validity today.
Monikered ‘News Values’, co-authored by Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy, this is a book that draws up a set of rules for journalists and editors to follow –by which to work, from which to plan and execute the content of a publication or a broadcast. Previous accounts of news values tended to be of two kinds-the first examined news stories from the perspective of the working journalist and tried to isolate the features of an event which make it likely to qualify as newsworthy. The second attempts a broader approach- incorporating areas such as ideology, cultural conditioning, technological determinism and others. The authors of ‘News Values’ are convinced that a third approach is needed in conjunction with these two existing schools of thought. They opine that that third approach is necessary because of changes within individual media and because of the shift in the nature of the relationships between providers and consumers of news.
In order to explore their thesis the authors have conducted detailed analysis of news output in print , broadcast and new media. Through the course of this book the authors analyse the various branches of the media and it’s key players with a view to establishing the values which apply for this great new age of media. The authors take note of the fact that in broadcast news issues of programme format contend with more traditional news values in determining which stories are selected for mainstream network television news bulletins. They examine how stories’ inclusion and prominence in television bulletins are shaped by stylistic as well as aesthetic factors. They investigate the role of story treatments in broadcast news- such factors as the overall shape of the programme package, the live two-way exchange between studio and on-location reporter, live voice-piece etc. which affect the editorial decision making process. They also examine how far the same issues govern story selection in radio, role of planning in news output, the role of the change in newspaper(evolution from fact to comment in print journalism) and what are the criteria adopted in the decision to include or exclude events which are not of immediate significance.
This book though very useful to journalists for the understanding it gives them about newsworthiness of events, is not going to be applicable in the heat of a newsroom(where the journalist is usually led by instinct). Instead it is a system which helps explain what makes news newsworthy for the benefit of students and analysts of all media forms. Journalism colleges and Media training Institutes should have it in their curriculum.

Johnson Thomas