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The Six Values of News
The Six Values of News
News is an unpublished account of real-life human activity, which aims to inform, interest or entertain the readers. It’s like a hot piece of cake coming out of the oven. Otherwise anything, that has come out of print, doesn’t make news. The fourth basic requirement is that it must be designed with some intent to impart some kind of information to the audience. This information may be of a general nature, or it may be completely relevant to the audience and the time given.
News as a medium of conveying human interest, has developed through the years into two major types, namely news reporting and news writing. News reporting is a form of non-press releases. These are written forms, which convey information and are normally submitted to media for publication. While news writing is primarily a form of narrative art, it conveys information in a clear-cut manner. Both the styles have evolved separately and have been complementing each other, over the years.
The value of a news story really depends on the intention with which it was published. If the purpose of publishing a news story is to convey some kind of information, whether it is serious or not, it will almost certainly have a positive effect on the reader/viewer. Hence, news reporting always aim at one thing, that is to convey some kind of information. However, if the objective is purely to entertain and inform, the news story may not have any significant importance. This is a very important aspect of news, which is often ignored by many people. The main point here is to understand the difference between news and entertainment.
News is predominantly oriented towards the social and technological aspects of society. It tends to inform and educate the mass public about the current happenings. Therefore, the news values in today’s world are different than those of yesteryear. Whereas in past newspapers, editors and publishers were keen to maintain the old standards of newsworthiness, they today prefer facts and figures over subjective stories. They tend to publish news articles as if they are newsworthy, even though they may be completely trivial to the subject matter or to the audience. Hence, it is not surprising that today you find many journalists writing news articles, without considering their opinions or what they really think about the subject at hand.
Another important feature of news writing is the inverted pyramid. This is a type of inverted pyramid in which two topics, which seem to be unrelated are actually related through the sub-topics. For instance, while the first topic could be terrorism and the second could be labor force, the third topic is tourism. In the inverted pyramid, the sub-topics are connected to one another through the various levels of the inverted pyramid.
So, in conclusion, the news needs to inform and educate, it needs to be entertaining as well as informative. Today, most newspapers are more focused on providing entertainment value and less on news value. If you look at any newspaper today, you would hardly find a story that would be newsworthy, except for a sports event or a celebrity photo shoot. While some still try to maintain the traditional news value, it seems increasingly difficult. Hence, if you want to contribute value to the public through your news articles, you need to consider these six values mentioned above, as well as the inverted pyramid and the famous man bites news letter.