What is so essential about news?

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Just like most of the reporters and editors I know, I never went to journalism school. Absurdly, I'm now on the faculty at a journalism school. Through sitting in on the classes of my colleagues I'm only now being exposed to some foundational reporting and news conventions.

Learning the conventions is, I suppose, kind of the point of school. Still, I find much of journalism's orthodoxy frustrating, especially in a setting where young people are exchanging their money and idealism for such outdated material.

These conventions don't serve reporters and they don't serve audiences. More than half of people recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said the news often failed at meet the extremely low bar of making them “feel informed.” It seems like all of us, in newsrooms and journalism schools, should be challenging everything we know right now and then changing what doesn't check out.

Nowhere is the need for change more clear than in “news values.” Also called newsworthiness, these criteria: impact, emotion, conflict, timeliness, proximity, prominence, and novelty, have come up in two classes so far. These values were questioned in one class I attended, even as they were offered as an acceptable standard for coverage decisions. In the other class, they were presented as canonical.

You guys! What are we even doing!?!

I've been skeptical about news judgment decisions since my earliest days in journalism. But I didn't know about these criteria. Or that they are the result of a back-and-forth between academia and industry. Academics in the 1960's first analyzed news content to develop a taxonomy of factors they could understand as driving the coverage. One of those researchers, Johan Galtung, said later in his life that his work was not meant to be instructive but critical. “Our work from the early 1960s was meant to be a warning of the consequences for the way news media filtered the world,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “But the western news industry believed I was describing how things should be done, instead of what is being done.” Galtung, for his part, stopped speaking to the media for decades while his list became a standard component of J-school curricula.

I had no idea. Now, I belatedly understand why pushing for an information-gap or community needs-based approach to coverage decisions could be seen as radical instead of practical (it's still the later).

I don't want to overstate the impact of these particular news values being codified and reinforced in academia. I know I'm not the only skilled reporter and editor oblivious to them. In fact, one study (if you have trouble accessing these, I'm happy to email you a copy) found that even journalists who are explicitly taught news values forget them! The same study found reporters find it hard to articulate what drives their own coverage decisions.

This view of news and its purpose does travel, though. They were recently held up as audience-serving, erroneously I think, by NPR's Public Editor earlier this year.

We don't need consensus around news values but we do need better ones. Improved news values would be more aligned with goals for what service an individual piece of news offers to a person or community. The current values don't truly contemplate utility, they are about attracting attention.

I created my own list of essential news functions a few years ago. These were incredibly useful at the time for my newsroom, bu they are overdue for more interrogation. Over the next few weeks that is the project we can engage in here. The 2020 news functions were: record creation, record correction, filling information gaps, accountability, narrative shift, and community connection. I encourage you to come up with your own list, and I would love to see it.

I have some questions for us as we work through this:

• What values do you want to see drive the news?
• Are these values different from the functions you want news to have in the world? What functions do you want your news to have?
• Do you think it's important the audience know and understand what drives coverage? How would you tell them? 

What I'm reading

A large handful of studies about news values, most of which are linked here. I'm also listening to Wesley Morris interview Nikole Hannah-Jones on Morris’ Cannonball podcast. These two are some of the best to ever do it, and this conversation is a gift. It is also incredibly relevant to questions about news judgment. Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project made me think that a core function of news needed to be record correction. In this conversation, she talks about the ripple effects of reporting that can undermine popular but inaccurate narratives. It is an honest conversation about the power reporting can have, the blowback it can bring, and the role of dissent.

One question for you

First, a confession. I continue to feel a little uncomfortable in this blog/missive/dispatch form. I chose this form to explore ideas that are not fully formed and in flux, but I want to know if it feels too underbaked. Would you prefer if these writings came less frequently but were more fully reported? Would more viewpoints, on the record, be helpful? Please let me know, and I'll take it under advisement. I would appreciate the feedback.

Have a great week. I'll be back with more on values next Tuesday.