But when a man bites a dog..

Now THAT'S news!

Following on from the oh-so-fabulous introduction to journalistic ethics last week, we were today provided a rather enigmatic view on news, newsworthiness, and the values that accompany them. Today's lecture had everything, from (bordering-on-racist) comments about our neighbours across the Tasman to a joke or two about an image of a poor English fellow, it's any wonder we got any work done at all. But Bruce is the consummate professional, and he didn't disappoint.

After the now accepted (and expected) reference to the 'Inverted Pyramid', we were thrust once more into the world of journalistic ideals, morals and concepts. Bruce posed the question, "are values the same across different media services, countries and cultures?" While the answer is an obvious one to most, the extent to which many in the room were willing to commit to a response meant we weren't entirely educated on the reasoning 'why'. This is where 'newsworthiness' became an important talking point.

"A sense of news values is the first quality of editors - they are the human sieves of the torrent of news, even more important even than an ability to write or a command of language." 

- Harold Evans, 2000

There were numerous given examples from 'expert' commentators on how to define a story's newsworthiness; lists upon lists compiled of garbled text that seemed largely hypocritical of itself. For one of the most common examples provided was 'simplicity of a story'; congratulations, you've managed to complicate a definition of simplicity! For this reason, I'm going to largely ignore these lists and focus on the (in my opinion) most useful.

Murray Masterson wrote of the 'Big 6' in regards to the newsworthiness of a story.

1. Significance; how relevant/important the story is in the 'scheme' of things.
   
2. Proximity; is the story a local/national/international event? Stories given precedence based on the viewing audience and the media outlet providing the content.
   
3. Conflict; large or minor scale (depending on the media outlet), from warring nations (News of the World) to feuding neighbours (ACA, Today Tonight etc).
   
4. Human Interest; not necessarily important information-wise. 'Feel good' stories, celeb-gossip. etc.
   
5. Novelty; something 'out of the ordinary' or not of normal occurrence (see: man bites dog).
   
6. Prominence; are stories such as this happening in other places? How frequent and to what degree?

Towards the end of the lecture, Bruce touched once again on hyper-commercialisation. "You don't control the eyeballs" was a comment made by Jay Rosen, directed at this hyper-commercialisation that sees mass media mergers trending towards controlling what we as a viewing audience are subjected to; 'subjected' painting a poignant picture of just how controlling they have become.

And the media knows it.

Should we be worried? Somewhat. But I believe with this hyper-commercialisation we must remember that media organisations can only function as a commercial enterprise as long as there is an audience willing to continue viewing. There can therefore never be a stage where we have no single choice as to what news we receive - because then there would be no media to provide it.

Unless commercial media has a death wish.