News Values from an Audience Perspective

This book focuses on journalistic news values from an audience perspective. The audience influences what is deemed newsworthy by journalists, not only because journalists tell their stories with a specific audience in mind, but increasingly because the interaction of the audience with the news can be measured extensively in digital journalism and because members of the audience have a say in which stories will be told. The first section considers how thinking about news values has evolved over the last fifty years and puts news values in a broader perspective by looking at news consumers’ preferences in different countries worldwide. The second section analyses audience response, explaining how audience appreciation and ‘clicking’ behaviour informs headline choices and is measured by algorithms. Section three explores how audiences contribute to the creation of news content and discusses mainstream media’s practice of recycling audience contributions on their own social media channels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030450465

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© The Author(s) 2021

M. Temmerman, J. Mast (eds.)News Values from an Audience Perspectivehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45046-5_1

1. Introduction: News Values from an Audience Perspective

Martina Temmerman¹   and Jelle Mast¹  

(1)

Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Martina Temmerman (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Jelle Mast

Email: [e-mail]

Ever since Galtung and Ruge (1965) published their seminal study on news values, the topic has not been out of focus in journalism studies. Harcup and O’Neill added influential contributions in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Harcup and O’Neill 2001; O’Neill and Harcup 2009), which they updated in the second decade (Harcup and O’Neill 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2020) and recently we witnessed a complementary interest from discourse studies and corpus linguistics (e.g. Bednarek and Caple 2017).

News values play an important role in the news selection process. Studies in journalism have constantly been revisiting and redefining the criteria for news selection, but they mostly start either from the point of view of the journalist or from the analysis of the journalistic texts and/or visuals delivered. However, in the academic thinking about journalism, an audience turn (after the linguistic turn and the narrative turn) has taken place. User-based approaches to journalism have been introduced (see among others Costera Meijer and Groot Kormelink 2016), focusing on production (e.g. investigating the involvement of the audience in the journalistic creation process) as well as on consumption (e.g. measuring clicking patterns in online news processing).

Combining the study of news values with the audience turn offers new perspectives, which we want to explore in this book. The role of the audience in the news selection process, not only as the ‘projected’ news consumer in the heads of journalists and/or editors-in-chief but also as the active and reactive transmitter of news or as the interactive factor in the measurement of online responses and click through rates, has not been studied extensively from a news values angle yet. The impact of the audience on what becomes news and the changes in news values caused by the audience are the core topics of the contributions in this volume.

Of course, we have also reflected on the audience we envisaged ourselves with this book volume. We wanted it to be as broad as possible, which is why we have asked our authors to step down from the mere academic register they write in most of the time and to make their insights as accessible as possible, for the non-specialist reader as well.

This book is divided in three parts. Part I gives an overview of how thinking about news values has evolved over the last 50 years. Critical notes are added on the applicability of news value theory and on the importance of a proper news selection for a vital civil society. Additionally, in order to put news values in a broader, global perspective, news consumers’ preferences and behaviour are discussed based on a survey conducted in 15 countries worldwide.

Tony Harcup , one of the ‘founding parents’ of the study of news values, has written Chap. 2 for this volume. He offers a very personal account of how his conceptions of news and the audience have evolved since the 1960s until now. In his career, he has always approached news values from the perspective of the journalist or the scholar. Together with Deirdre O’Neill, he published influential papers on the forces that determine what becomes news (Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2017; O’Neill and Harcup 2009, 2020). He now switches his viewpoint to that of a member of the news audience (who has unavoidably at the same time processed numerous empirical studies of the factors that determine what is news), who wants to add some critical thinking about what news could be.

His point is that news helps in creating a potential for the audience to become active citizens and that it is therefore primordial to always have the audience in mind when working as a journalist. He draws on the notion of ‘imaginative empathy’ (Berger 1975) to argue that, if news stories appeal to this sentiment, the audience will develop a capacity of solidarity and overcome immature reflexes like interpreting the world in terms of us-them oppositions. This does not mean that news stories should be tear-jerking and emotional but that journalists should be able to sketch balanced representations by ‘listening actively’ (Robinson 2011) to the people involved.

Harcup goes on to say that active listening creates a dialogic relationship between journalists and their audience(s). Enhancing the imaginative empathy simultaneously reduces stereotyping and distortion and creates ‘emotional proximization’ (Kopytowska 2015).

After about 40 years of thinking about journalism, Harcup feels entitled to define what ‘good journalism’ is and for him, trying to fight apathy and to inspire the audience to take action is key to this definition. Recognising and recording the agency of the audience means that journalists provide enough context so that relations and proportions become clear; that they ask questions about the structural forces in society and that they reflect on how the news affects the bulk of the population, rather than the ‘Great Men or Women’.

For Harcup, the agency of the audience still only becomes part of the news production process through the agency of the journalist. For other authors, the agency of the audience is a more independent force, which can influence and steer the production and distribution of news in its own right. This is explained in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 is a theoretical one, in which Steve Paulussen and Peter Van Aelst give an account of the study of news values since Galtung and Ruge (1965) till the present day and discuss the question which research topics should be addressed and which methods should be used to establish the relationship between news values and the audience. This chapter provides the bigger scope for the central topic of this volume. It tries to finetune the concept of news values, which is used by many different authors in many different ways and elaborates on the changes brought about by digital journalism and more specifically on the way audience analytics affect the construction of news(worthiness).

According to Paulussen and Van Aelst, there are two models of thinking about news values and three approaches to study them: on the one hand there is the causal model that considers events and utterances to possess inherent qualities or ‘news factors’ (Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006) which are then selected by journalists on the basis of a consensus about the significance of these qualities. It is this consensus that determines the news value. The functional model on the other hand is routine-related and considers news values to be the outcome of the pragmatics of journalistic production routines.

Both models can be found in studies on the gatekeeping or selection approach to news values, which try to answer the question why certain topics are selected for the news and others are not.

Another possible approach is the discursive approach. All studies in this domain adhere to the functional model and focus on how the news is presented, which angles and frames are applied and to which distortions of the facts these choices can lead. News values in this approach can be seen as the ‘pegs’ to hang the news on.

A third approach is the replication approach, which is interested in the way the representation of the news is echoed in society and the public domain. This approach applies the causal model and considers news values to be cognitive clues that attract people’s attention. Especially in an age of information abundance, cognitive clues are important structuring devices.

With the advent of digital and social media, direct and indirect influences of the audience on the gatekeeping process and on the construction of news and newsworthiness have become more visible and important. While the presence of the audience in the back of journalists’ minds was already recognised in the routine-related functional model, the independent role of news consumers as secondary gatekeepers is now a new domain of study. By clicking, liking, sharing and commenting, the audience influences the production and distribution of news and these processes deserve scholarly attention. These new evolutions will be discussed in depth in Chap. 5.

Also, future research on news values might focus on the cognitive cues and try to find out which news values the audience applies for making a selection from the constant stream of information, for sharing this information and for assessing it. Taken one step further, these news cues could be detected automatically and news bots and social media algorithms could produce news tailored to the wishes of the audience.

When thinking about the future of journalism, Paulussen and Van Aelst plead in favour of a thorough examination of what kind of news values should be reproduced in automated journalism and what kind of news gatekeepers we want machines to be. For them, audience-oriented journalism should not be equated to commercial or market-driven journalism and should not reduce audiences to their consumer role.

Chapter 4 puts the topic of news values and the audience in a global perspective. Jeffrey Wilkinson, August Grant, Yicheng Zhu and Diane Guerrazzi point out that news values have been studied extensively by Western researchers, but that relatively little attention has been paid to news consumers’ behaviour around the world.

The authors confirm what was contended in the previous chapter, that is there has been a transformation of news consumers from passive receivers to active seekers and contributors and they emphasise that it is important to see that the disruptive nature of the ongoing information revolution is a global phenomenon. Still, what is perceived as news values may be different around the world. For too long, first-world nations have dominated the global news, but the diffusion of mobile broadband media technologies has had a democratisation effect on news consumption. Local news for local-audience media systems have been established in many countries and cultures. That is why the authors surveyed news consumers in 15 countries, geographically and culturally spread around the globe, and asked them about their conceptions of news. Both news topics (inherent news qualities of events or ‘news factors’ as they were called in Chap. 3) and news values as cognitive clues with varying salience (see also Chap. 3) were questioned. News topics and news values were then related to the internet use in the countries under study.

The authors found that there were vast differences in perceptions of news and news values in the different countries. Inherent news qualities and salience were tied to different topics in every country, depending on specific events happening at the time of the survey. However, some common ground was found for values like ‘proximity’ and ‘unexpectedness’. These appear to be the most universal values, raising the attention of audiences in all cultures. This study shows that researchers should be careful in applying the results of news studies from one country to another, but that generally, inherent news factors are more determining for the perceived news value than discursive techniques which only give shape to the formal representation of the events.

Part II of this book contains three contributions on news professionals’ strategies and their views of audiences. This part tackles the topic of measuring the audience responses, explaining how audience response is used as a news value in itself by journalists but also how online editors change headlines based on measurements of the audience’s appreciation or how algorithms decide what is the most important news based on the audience’s clicking behaviour. ‘Clickworthiness’ and ‘shareability’ are central concepts here.

In Chap. 5, Edson Tandoc Jr., Lydia Cheng and Julian Maitra elaborate on the ideas put forward in Chap. 3, that is the power dynamics between journalists and news audiences have changed, facilitated by changes in information and communication technologies. The authors confirm that the gatekeeping processes have been altered fundamentally as more and more non-journalists are taking part in journalistic processes with the advent of digital media.

But audience measurement systems have changed as well. News organisations have long tracked their audiences but they were dependent on limited surveying methods. Now, with web analytics, audience data (from a much larger segment than before) is collected automatically, and it can be analysed, synthetised and reported in real time. As they are under pressure by competition and declining sales figures, many newsrooms resort to web analytics as a tool that can help them understand and grow their audience and they adapt their news content according to the audience behaviour.

This catering to the wishes of the audience has also led news factors and news values to change. Attracting more traffic or views on the website is now a news factor in itself. In this respect, the authors think it is significant that Harcup and O’Neill (2017) have added ‘shareability’ to their list of news values. The notion of shareability will be further explored in Chaps. 8 and 9. Web analytics are used to decide which stories are important and which will be followed up. The techniques are also applied to see which discursive and cosmetic changes to the presentation of the news generate more traffic and thus increase dissemination.

The introduction of web analytics in the newsroom has changed journalistic work fundamentally. Social media managers have entered the newsroom and take part in making editorial decisions. Journalists are now required to actively share their work on third-party platforms, such as social media. They monitor the metrics to gauge the success of their stories and research suggests that they even rely on analytics to cross-check their news judgement.

According to the authors, there has always been a field of tension between editorial autonomy and ‘giving the audience what it wants’. Many journalists would not admit it, but the degree of interest the audience would show in a story was often the decisive factor for choosing to publish it. In digital journalism, it has even become harder to ignore the audience as web analytics has been routinely embedded in journalistic routines. But news construction remains an important public good. Therefore, web analytics should not be seen as a goal but rather as a helpful tool which when applied wisely, assists professional editors in bringing the best information to the largest possible group.

Chapter 6 provides an example of how audience metrics can be used to decide which headline to choose for online news articles. Luuk Lagerwerf and Charlotte Govaert explain that the headline’s function, which traditionally was to grab the readers’ attention allowing them to decide whether to read the article or not, now has evolved to luring the readers into clicking on the article’s link, presented in an array of other headline links. The question newsrooms are interested then in is which factors generate ‘clickworthiness’.

The authors synthesise the literature on headlines and explain that headlines are traditionally characterised as short summaries of the news item they precede. However, there are variations to this general rule: some headlines only highlight a detail or foreground a quotation, while others present a riddle that is resolved in the ensuing text. So, apart from the referential function, headlines often have an additional function, which is to attract the reader’s attention and stimulate them to read the article. Thus, from a linguistic point of view, headlines simultaneously have a semantic and a pragmatic function, that is to highlight the article’s meaning and to incite the reader to continue reading. Combining these two functions in one theory, Dor (2003) argues that headlines are designed to optimise the article’s relevance for the reader.

For this chapter, the authors investigated which news values (as defined in the vast literature on the topic) work best in headlines for attracting the reader’s attention, to what extent the foregrounding of news values in the headlines results in higher click through rates and how foregrounding news values compares to other techniques that are aimed at increasing ‘clickworthiness’, such as forward referencing (Blom and Hansen 2015) and language intensity. Using Chartbeat, they conducted a quantitative content analysis on an A/B headline test corpus from the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

The results of this analysis show that on the whole, the foregrounding of news values in headlines does not generate a higher click through rate. The only news value that was effective was ‘negativity’. Looking at the linguistic features of the headlines however, the authors found that ‘sentiment words’ (Kuiken et al. 2017) were very good predictors of high click through rates. Sentiment words often co-occur with the news value ‘negativity’ but also with the linguistic technique of language intensity. This technique in turn often co-occurs with the news value ‘superlativeness’. The authors suggest that further research should be done in order to finetune the content characteristics of news values and their linguistic features.

In Chap. 7, Michaël Opgenhaffen comes back to the topic of headlines (discussed in the previous chapter) and combines this with the topic of news values on social media (also discussed in Chap. 9). He analyses the headlines established news media (newspapers and magazines as well as TV stations) display on social media in order to attract readers to their websites. The news media value both the clicks (enhancing the traffic on their websites) and the engagement that their posts generate (making their sites more visible on social media).

The function of headlines on news websites is not only to attract the reader’s attention but also to make the reader curious about the content of the article and incite him or her to click through. These headlines are sometimes called clickbait (Kuiken et al. 2017): they aim at attracting the reader’s attention by hiding crucial information. When news media advertise these headlines on social media, they make sure to select the ones that are most ‘shareable’. This is the most important news value in this context.

From his literature review, Opgenhaffen learned that news messages which are most shared on social media are messages which contain pronounced positive or negative news, messages with an ‘awe factor’ and messages in the categories soft/emotional news. Moreover, in order to be able to compete with personal messages on the Facebook news feed, the messages need attractive headlines, formulated in an appealing way. That is why often a caption is added to the title that is taken over from the news site. These captions or status messages (Welbers and Opgenhaffen 2019) can be seen as extra headlines which news organisations use to add an extra layer of information or interpretation and to strengthen ties with the audience.

Captions have been studied in content analyses studies before, but here, Opgenhaffen wants to gain more insight into the strategies and arguments of the social media managers of news organisations for using them. For that purpose, he has interviewed social media managers of 22 news organisations in Flanders and The Netherlands. The results show that editors working for the social media channels of established news organisations clearly have a different audience in mind than the editors for the news sites. They try to attract new readers and adapt the captions they use to the customs of social media communication. This means that they formulate the captions in a more playful way, sometimes using emotional and non-neutral language. The use of emoji also fits in this strategy. What the interviews show as well is