Have you ever watched the news or read a paper and thought to yourself,”Why did this story make it to the front page? or I wonder why that story is top news?” Well there is reasoning behind that. Gatekeepers, the people responsible for choosing which stories appear first, second, etc look at eight key factors when deciding.
The eight characteristics that makes information newsworthy are:
- Timeliness
- Prominence
- Proximity
- Significance
- Unusualness
- Human Interest
- Conflict
- Newness
Timeliness is very important with information because news needs to be current and up to date. Plain and simple old news isn’t “new”.
Prominence is news that is covered on a famous person or important organizations.
Proximity is news that affects your personal communities or hometown. It’s closely related to you and affects you versus having news about some town in China.
Significance is when news or an event can affect a large amount of people. For example the issues related to Global Warming.
Unusualness is when news is very uncommon and out of the ordinary.
Human Interest is when news stories are about people and that is not limited to just celebrities. For example, a story about a single mother that lost her job and still managed to give her children a great Christmas.
Conflict is news about war, or stories about controversy.
Newsness is news about new information about a product or company. For example, information about the new Iphone 5 release.
News doesn’t have to have all of these characteristics at the same time, but it should have at least two. So whenever you watch the news or read a paper and you see the stories that are introduced think to yourself do they have any of the eight characteristics of news.
EriickaDee's Blog 