What Makes It News
Newsworthiness is a weighing of six values — impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence, conflict, and novelty — and the more of them a fact carries, the stronger its claim on the reader's limited attention. · 10 min
Thousands of things happened in your town yesterday. A newspaper prints perhaps thirty of them. Someone decided, thirty times, that this fact deserved a stranger's attention and that one did not. The decision is called news judgment, and it is not a mood — it is a weighing. Editors weigh every candidate fact against six values, and the more of them a fact carries, the harder it is to leave out. This folio teaches you the six, and how to weigh with them.
Guess before you learn
Two stories compete for the front page of a Milford paper. One: a chemical spill closes Milford's high school for a week. Two: a movie star is photographed at an airport two thousand miles away. Which runs first?
The spill wins on impact and proximity: it changes the coming week for thousands of the paper's own readers. Fame is one value — prominence — but the spill carries three or four at once. If you picked the star, you have noticed something real about the news business; hold that thought for the section on values in tension.
9–12
3–5
Before a story runs, an editor asks six questions. Does it change people's lives? Did it just happen? Did it happen near our readers? Is someone well known involved? Are people in a struggle over it? Is it surprising? Every yes makes the story stronger.
A story can win with one loud yes. A flood that ruins two hundred homes is news even if nobody famous is in it. Most stories need two or three yeses to earn their place.
6–8
The six news values have names. Impact — how many lives change, and how much. Timeliness — it happened just now, or is about to. Proximity — it happened near the people reading. Prominence — a person or institution the reader already knows. Conflict — sides in open disagreement. Novelty — a departure from the expected.
The values add. A tax vote tonight (timeliness) in your district (proximity) that raises what every homeowner pays (impact), over a council split four to three (conflict), carries four. That story leads the page. Newsworthiness is not a property of events; it is a relation between a fact and a particular audience.
9–12
Treat the six as weights on one scale rather than boxes to tick. They trade off: prominence can carry a weak story (a senator's fender-bender) while impact goes unreported when it moves slowly (a rising asthma rate). Proximity is measured from the audience, so the same fire is a lead story in one city and a brief in another. And every value is relative to attention already spent — the third snowstorm of the month arrives with its novelty discounted.
Two consequences follow. First, news judgment can be argued about rationally: name the values, weigh them aloud, and disagreement becomes specific. Second, the values reward the sudden over the gradual — a bias every serious newsroom knows about itself and works to correct.
K–2
News is what people need to know today. A storm coming tonight is news. It touches everyone. You can get ready because someone told you.
Closer news matters more. A broken swing in your park is news to you. A broken swing in a faraway park is not.
Undergrad
The canonical treatment is Galtung and Ruge (1965), who proposed a dozen news factors — frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, and others — predicting which foreign events entered Norwegian papers. Harcup and O'Neill's revisions (2001, 2016) recast the list for contemporary practice, adding categories the original missed: celebrity, entertainment, and the news organization's own agenda. The six-value form you are learning is the working newsroom compression of that literature.
Read the values as selection criteria operating under scarcity. Column inches and reader attention are finite; the values are a ranking function over candidate facts. That framing explains both their power and their pathology — whatever the function rewards, the world learns to perform.
Postgrad
Push past the list to its critiques. Gans and Tuchman read news values as ideology: newsworthiness naturalizes editorial choices that in fact reproduce institutional routines — beats, deadlines, official sources — so the values describe the industry as much as the world. Measurement complicates causality further: audience metrics now feed selection directly, so the weighting drifts toward what gets clicked, a feedback loop Galtung and Ruge never had to model.
The live normative question: are the six values a description of attention or a theory of civic need? Impact and conflict answer different masters — the first serves the reader as citizen, the second the reader as spectator. Where a newsroom sets that balance is an editorial constitution, usually unwritten.
news values
The six tests a fact must face: impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence, conflict, novelty. The more it carries, the stronger its claim on the page.
Why is this true?
Why is the same event front-page news in one city and a one-paragraph brief in another?
Because proximity is measured from the audience. Newsworthiness is a relation between a fact and a particular readership, not a property of the event alone — distance drains proximity and impact while the event itself is unchanged.
The values also collide, and the collisions are where judgment lives. Novelty tempts hardest: the strange story is easy to notice and easy to overrate. The old test — a dog biting a man is not news; a man biting a dog is — holds as far as it goes, but a thousand dog bites a year in one city is impact wearing a dull coat. Slow, large stories lose to sudden, small ones on every value except the one that matters most. A reporter who knows the six values also knows when to argue against them.
You now own the scale. Six values, weighed from the reader's chair, argued aloud when they collide. The next folio takes the fact that survives the weighing and asks the harder question: what, exactly, are you trying to find out? That question — narrow, answerable, specific — is where reporting begins.
Practice — new ink and old, interleaved
1.Your readers are in Dover. Which story carries proximity?
2.The senator your readers elected is indicted this morning, in your city, in an open feud between two agencies, over contracts that shaped the local budget. Counting impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence, and conflict once each where they clearly apply — and leaving novelty aside — how many values does the story carry?
3.Order by strength of timeliness alone, strongest first.
- A verdict read ten minutes ago
- A report released yesterday
- A trend measured over a decade
4.Without looking back: what does it mean that newsworthiness is a relation, not a property?
The same event carries different weight for different audiences — proximity and impact are measured from the readers, so news value depends on who is reading, not on the event alone.
How close were you? Grade yourself honestly — it sets your review date.