Everyday something happens; this we know to be true. It is the basis for these posts after all. Everyday somebody gets up and does something and we either hear about it or we don't. Either way it still happens. However, what constitutes whether we, the public, hear about it or not from various news sources, is the 'newsworthiness' of the particular event.
As was discussed in the lecture yesterday, newsworthiness is decided by a set of news values or "broadly agreed set of values." What I found interesting though, was the multiple attempts of people (various journalists, scholars and the like) to limit the number of news values to the fewest number possible. O'Neill and Harcup, Murray Materson, and Judy McGregor have tried and in ways succeeded to do this.
However for the purpose of looking at an event that occurred today and applying the news values to it to determine the newsworthiness of it, I shall refer to the 12+ Factors: the original set of news values created by Galtung and Ruge. I feel like these news values are really the essential ones. Despite the attempts of people to limit them down, they always seem to still be the same few, as it was discussed in the lecture.
On this day in 1977, a march in Istanbul, Turkey turned from protest into a gunfight. The May Day parade, in which 100, 000 people were involved, took a turn for the worst when rival leftist groups started shooting, resulting in the death of 33 people.
I'm only going to talk about a few of the news values that can be associated at the time with impacting what labelled this as a newsworthy story. However, the 12+ Factors are: negativity, proximity, recency, currency, continuity and uniqueness, simplicity, personality, predictability, elite nations or people, exclusivity and size. I shall discuss three.
The first of these three news value is simplicity: stories which are easy to explain are more likely to draw an audience than complex stories. The riots cover a complex story. There are quite a number of questions associated with this news story that make it complicated: what is the cause behind the riots? How long as the issue been a problem? How many people has it affected and for how long? From that then, I assume that whilst they are interesting political and cultural topics make for complicated stories.
The second is recency: this relates to the time period and when the article was published. Basically it's how recent it was as news (was it on the day or several days later?). At the time this was published it would have been breaking news. As it's associated with death and events that good effect everybody it's locality and the influence that a story that such as this would have on the people of Istanbul would have made it a recent and relevant story.
Lastly, the news value of simplicity is also an important factor in newsworthiness of a story. The riots were not a simple news story. It would have been very complex with many questions attached to it (why were the people doing the shooting fighting, what organization were they a part of, how long had they been active in Istanbul, how many people's lives had they effected?) Of course these questions would have been answered in any articles relating to the riots but the fact that the journalists would have had to go out there and find the answers and talk to people makes it very complicated.
Overall the effect of news values in shaping articles is a very important aspect of journalism. I like the fact that despite the development of journalism in the modern age with technology and digitalisation and stuff like that, there is still the whole idea of scoping out the story; finding the story that is the most important and the most important as news.
I really wish I was born in the 50's. Then I could be like a 1950's reporter.
Just for the suite really.
Image available: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/05/369245.htm
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