7 The news values

After spending the morning mining her beat for stories, a reporter breathlessly runs into her editor’s office.

“I’ve got a story!” she says, beside herself with excitement.

“What is it?” the editor asks.

“As I was crossing the street between Sixth and Main, I saw a dog run up to a mail carrier and sink its teeth into his behind! The mailman yelled. Several people saw it. I can write it up. I think it’s got front page written all over it!”

The editor thought for a quick moment and said to the reporter, “That’s not a story! Go out there and get me something that will get our readers’ attention. I don’t want a story with the headline ‘Dog Bites Man.’ People want to read ‘Man Bites Dog’”!

Badum-bum.

That apocryphal story is such a part of newspaper lore that the phrase “Man Bites Dog” is now an aphorism that all journalists understand without hearing the entire story. If the editor simply says, “This is a Dog Bites Man story,” the reporter knows she has to do better.

It also illustrates one of the eight news values that guide journalists and tell readers whether a story is news or not.

The news values have stood the test of time. During that time, trends have disrupted and impacted approaches to reporting: Radio, television, The New Journalism, civic journalism and citizen journalism are just a few of them. But no matter the techniques and tools journalists use, this collection of values guides them. The news values tell a journalist if the story will get the reader’s attention.

So, without further ado, here are the eight news values:

Timeliness.
Currency.
The unusual or bizarre.
Proximity.
Prominence.
Conflict.
Impact.
Human interest.

The presence of any one of these news values in a story can make it newsworthy. The more news values, the better the story. Or at least the more newsworthy. If you’ve ever wondered why some stories are on the front page and some are buried inside, it’s because of news values. Dozens of clicks vs. thousands? News values.

By themselves, the news values also carry specific weights. Conflict is the strongest of the eight. As in fiction writing, conflict prompts readers or viewers to take sides. That emotional investment draws audience members into the story. They might want to see that their side is represented, or they might want to hear the arguments to help better understand the issue.

Currency also weighs more heavily on the news value scale. Currency is simply what’s on people’s minds at any given time. It’s what’s current. An issue or an actual occurrence can have currency. Gun control (an issue) and coronavirus (an event or phenomenon) both have it. Currency can also change. Some stories, like coronavirus, will eventually stop having currency once the pandemic is over. When’s the last time you read a story about the Spanish influenza, for example? Issues related to race—from slavery to Black Lives Matter—are unlikely to ever lose currency in the United States.

If one news value is enough for a good story, what happens when a story has all of them? For starters, reporters get very excited about what they’re working on, knowing publication will prompt letters and phone calls, get the attention of the public and decision-makers, and generally make a splash that lots of people will hear or read. Even if the reporter isn’t thinking about each of the news values, he or she knows deep down the story will have tremendous repercussions.

 The Boston Globe’s Spotlight

There are few better examples of stories with all of the news values than the series by The Boston Globe that began with a report on sexual abuse of boys by a priest, the Rev. John J. Geoghan, over three decades. A group of Globe reporters known as the Spotlight team went on to uncover hundreds of cases of abuse that had been covered up by the Catholic Church at the highest levels.

The stories reverberated so strongly they won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. A movie was even made about the reporters. “Spotlight” won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2016. One by one, here is how the news values manifested themselves in the Spotlight stories.

• Prominence: The Catholic Church is a worldwide institution, the largest branch of Christianity, with 1.345 billion members. Priests themselves are typically trusted individuals who hold an elevated status within their churches, parishes and communities. The Archbishop of Boston, Bernard F. Law, who covered up the abuse in that diocese, was very well known there.
• Conflict: Conflict can be thought of as one side vs. another. The many conflicts in the Globe stories can be characterized as Geoghan vs. his victims; the archdiocese and bishops vs. the common good; the Catholic Church vs. U.S. laws; confidentiality vs. public’s need to know; many other priests vs. their many other victims, just for starters. The movie illustrates conflict the reporters had with those who didn’t want the stories to be published.
• Currency: The safety and welfare of children always has currency; child sexual abuse most of all.
• Impact: Geoghan had “six parish assignments in 34 years with accusations that he molested more than 130 children.” This, in turn, impacted the families of those children and impacted the global reputation of the Catholic Church. As a result of The Globe’s reporting, the Archbishop of Boston resigned his position and the church changed many of its policies. For the Geoghan case alone, the Boston Archdiocese paid $10 million to victims. Several priests with connections to Boston were sent to prison after the stories were published. That’s quite an impact.
• Proximity: In Boston, the stories concerned parishes in the city and surrounding areas. The Catholic Church also has members in every part of the globe, and incidents of priest sexual abuse were found around the world. Therefore, the story hits close to home for those in Boston, of course, but also for anyone anywhere who has any kind of connection to the Catholic church.
• Timeliness: The first story was published one week before two of Geoghan’s trials. Public records of the church’s activities surrounding sexual abuse were released the same month. As the reporting continued to reveal the widespread nature of the abuse, the series continued to break news and report new details.
• Unusual and bizarre: This news value is exactly what it sounds like. When something happens only rarely, its very occurrence makes news. Examples include the appearance of comets or the emergence of dormant cicadas. Another recent Associated Press story explained the news value in the lede itself.

In the Globe stories, however, the cases of child sex abuse turned out to be anything but            unusual. It was incomprehensibly widespread. The Globe series illustrates another related            but slightly different aspect of this news value: An event attracts attention when it’s                    unexpected, even if it’s not truly unusual.

• Human interest: The human-interest elements of the series centered around victims who told their personal experiences to the Globe reporters. One prominent example was the story of Patrick McSorley who was 12 when he was first abused by Geoghan. He told Globe reporter Michael Rezendes in chilling detail what happened to him and how it impacted his life. This and other human-interest angles of the story showed the victims weren’t just numbers; they were real, three-dimensional people and they explained how their lives were impacted. When a story goes beyond facts and figures and relates how people were personally impacted, that creates human interest.

While reporters can sometimes see, or at least sense, the news values before a story is published, the news values sometimes become apparent after publication. Matt Carroll was one of the members of the Globe’s Spotlight team who won the Pulitzer. Now a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston, he told N. C. State University student journalist Emma Berg that the most important outcome of the series was that it helped so many people.

“We got calls from across the country, people saying they had been abused,” Carroll said. The callers told the reporters they had earlier tried to speak out about their abuse at the hands of priests, but they weren’t believed.

Had the stories run 10 years earlier, Carroll said, they would have stayed local or regional. As the movie wryly notes with a shot of an AOL billboard, the stories were published early in the Internet era and, as a result, were rapidly disseminated around the world. Not only did people worldwide read the Globe stories, other news organizations began to report on local priests and parishes as well, expanding on the Globe’s reporting or uncovering entirely new cases.

“We gave these people a voice in the news,” Carroll said of the victims. “The stories helped people get mental health counseling. It was gratifying to people.” That is the ultimate impact.