JOUR1111 Lecture 9: Monetary Value

Apologies for the title of this instalment. It sucks, I know, but I'm not feeling terribly creative at the moment. Ah well. Forward, unto relevent things!

Today, I'm actually blogging about a lecture the day it happened!

This rambling rundown touches on the concept of 'News Values'. As Bruce mentioned, news values are determined by how prominent a media outlet makes a particular story, and how much attention the story receives from the public. Through this, we can determine what people want to hear, read and watch.

It should be readily apparent that every media outlet has a different set of values they apply to news, as do different cultures and nations. Fox News can hardly be compared to Al Jazeera, which in turn is completely different to our own ABC News. But how do these different bodies shape their separate values?

As was shwon in the lecture, there is an incredible amount of concepts drawn together to make up differnet ideas of news values. These include negativity, uniqueness, simplicity, exclusivity, significance, human interest and conflict, just to name a few! The lists are endless.

Unfortunately, the ideals of news worthiness are being corrupted by an array of factors, such as the incluence of PR on journalism, the horror that is the tabloids, hyper-commercialisation, and just plain lazy journalism.

The tabloids do know how to grab your attention, I'll admit.

  News values today are further being corrupted by the nature of media in itself. Mergers of various corporations and bodies create massive media cartels, which stagnate the diversity of perspectives presented by the news, as these cartels are often driving at their own values and agendas. Unfortunatley, this can prevent the real stories from getting out.

But never mind all that. It's time to look to the future! What are the news values of tomorrow? What decisions will be made in the coming years to decide what is newsworthy? To me, it's a pretty easy question to answer. We are the journalists of tomorrow. The news values of tomorrow are OUR values.

Power to the youth!