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What is news?
Galtung and Ruge revisited

Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill

2001, JOURNALISM STUDIES, Vol 2, Issue 1, pp.261-280
DOI:10.1080/14616700118449

1. Introduction

“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read,” explains
Corker, the hard-bitten hack in Scoop, adding: “And it’s only news until he’s read it.
After that it’s dead.” (Waugh 1943: 66.)
It is one answer to the apparently simple question - ‘what is news?’ - that continues to
exercise the minds of practitioners and students of journalism alike.
‘News values’ are one of the most opaque structures of meaning in modern
society. All ‘true journalists’ are supposed to possess it: few can or are
willing to identify or define it. Journalists speak of ‘the news’ as if events
select themselves. Further, they speak as if which is the ‘most significant’
news story, and which ‘news angles’ are most salient are divinely inspired.
Yet of the millions of events which occur daily in the world, only a tiny
proportion ever become visible as ‘potential news stories’: and of this
proportion, only a small fraction are actually produced as the day’s news in
the news media. We appear to be dealing, then, with a ‘deep structure’ whose
function as a selective device is un-transparent even to those who
professionally most know how to operate it.

(Hall 1973:181)

How, then, can the ground rules of the news selection process be made more visible?
One approach is to try to define the news values that come into operation when
journalists select stories. Norwegians John Galtung and Mari Ruge went some way
towards this when they published their paper on ‘The structure of foreign news’ in the
Journal of International Peace Research in 1965. Extracts subsequently appeared in
influential books on news production such as Cohen and Young’s The Manufacture of
News (1973), and Galtung and Ruge’s paper has long been regarded as a ‘landmark’
study of news values and news selection (Watson 1998:117). Their factors continue to
be cited as ‘prerequisites’ of news selection in the 21st century (Herbert 2000: 72-73).

The central question at the heart of their paper was how do events (specifically
foreign events in their case) become ‘news’? As academics with backgrounds in

1/News values
journalism as both practitioners and trainers, we found ourselves asking how useful or
applicable Galtung and Ruge’s taxonomy of news values remains today. We noted
that the news values put forward by Galtung and Ruge were hypothetical, were
limited to the reporting of foreign news, and were primarily concerned with the
reporting of events. Thus, we were interested in how well their news values could be
applied to foreign and domestic events, issues and other stories which become news.
We believed that we could go some way towards answering this by an examination of
the stories in leading UK newspapers to see which news values appeared to be
operational, taking as a starting point those news factors identified by Galtung and
Ruge.

This content analysis will be preceded by a review of what Galtung and Ruge actually
wrote in their original paper, and a review of subsequent literature on the subject of
their study in particular and news values in general. We go on to provide a
contemporary set of news values based on our empirical research. While we cannot
account for why so many events and issues are excluded from the news agenda (even
when fulfilling some of the criteria we have put forward), we believe we have gone
some way to updating, defining and making more visible the news values currently in
use by journalists in the news selection process.

2. Galtung and Ruge

Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge’s study began life as a paper presented at the First
Nordic Conference on Peace Research, which took place in Oslo in January 1963. It
was first published in 1965 and extracts have subsequently been printed in many
edited collections on the media (Tunstall 1970; Cohen and Young 1973; Cohen and
Young 1981; Tumber 1999).
The central question at the heart of their paper was: “How do ‘events’ become
‘news’?” They were specifically concerned with how overseas events did or did not
become foreign news in the Norwegian press. To explore this question, they presented
a series of factors that ‘seem to be particularly important’ in the selection of news,
followed by the deduction of some hypotheses from their list of factors. However,
Galtung and Ruge noted at the outset: “No claim is made for completeness in the list
of factors or ‘deductions’.” (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 64-65.)

Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors

F1. Frequency. An event that unfolds at the same or similar frequency as the news
medium (such as a murder) is more likely to be selected as news than is a social trend
that takes place over a long period of time.
F2. Threshold. Events have to pass a threshold before being recorded at all. After
that, the greater the intensity, the more gruesome the murder, and the more casualties
in an accident - the greater the impact on the perception of those responsible for news
selection.

2/News values
F3. Unambiguity. The less ambiguity, the more likely the event is to become news.
The more clearly an event can be understood, and interpreted without multiple
meanings, the greater the chance of it being selected.
F4. Meaningfulness. The culturally similar is likely to be selected because it fits into
the news selector’s frame of reference. Thus, the involvement of UK citizens will
make an event in a remote country more meaningful to the UK media. Similarly, news
from the USA is seen as more relevant to the UK than is news from countries which
are less culturally familiar.
F5. Consonance. The news selector may predict - or, indeed, want - something to
happen, thus forming a mental ‘pre-image’ of an event which in turn increases its
chances of becoming news.
F6. Unexpectedness. The most unexpected or rare events - within those that are
culturally familiar and/or consonant - will have the greatest chance of being selected
as news.
F7. Continuity. Once an event has become headline news it remains in the media
spotlight for some time - even if its amplitude has been greatly reduced - because it
has become familiar and easier to interpret. Continuing coverage also acts to justify
the attention an event attracted in the first place.
F8. Composition. An event may be included as news, less because of its intrinsic
news value than because it fits into the overall composition or balance of a newspaper
or news broadcast. This might not just mean ‘light’ stories to balance heavy news; it
could also mean that, in the context of newspaper reports on alleged institutional
racism within the police, for example, positive initiatives to combat racism which
would normally go unreported might make it onto the news pages.
F9. Reference to elite nations. The actions of elite nations are seen as more
consequential than the actions of other nations. Definitions of elite nations will be
culturally, politically and economically determined and will vary from country to
country, although there may be universal agreement about the inclusion of some
nations (eg the USA) among the elite.
F10. Reference to elite people. The actions of elite people, who will usually be
famous, may be seen by news selectors as having more consequence than the actions
of others. Also, readers may identify with them
F11. Reference to persons. News has a tendency to present events as the actions of
named people rather than a result of social forces. This personification goes beyond
‘human interest’ stories and could relate to ‘cultural idealism according to which man
is the master of his own destiny and events can be seen as the outcome of an act of
free will’.
F12. Reference to something negative. Negative news could be seen as unambiguous
and consensual, generally more likely to be unexpected and to occur over a shorter
period of time than positive news.
(Galtung and Ruge 1965: 65-71.)

After presenting these factors, Galtung and Ruge put forward three hypotheses:

3/News values
 1. The more events satisfy the criteria mentioned, the more likely that they
will be registered as news (selection).
2. Once a news item has been selected what makes it newsworthy according
to the factors will be accentuated (distortion).
3. Both the process of selection and the process of distortion will take place at
all steps in the chain from event to reader (replication).
(Galtung and Ruge 1965: 71.)

Following their examination of the coverage of three international crises in four

Norwegian newspapers1, Galtung and Ruge went on to discuss the extent to which
their factors could be considered in combination - ‘the more distant an event, the less
ambiguous will it have to be’ - before leaving conclusions on such questions to future
research. (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 80-83.)
Galtung and Ruge had an explicit agenda, urging journalists to ‘try and counteract all
12 factors’, and they concluded their paper with the following health warning: “It
should be emphasised...that the present article hypothesises rather than demonstrates
the presence of these factors, and hypothesises rather than demonstrates that these
factors, if present, have certain effects among the audience.” (Galtung and Ruge 1965:
84-85.)

3. After Galtung and Ruge: a review of the literature

Galtung and Ruge’s paper on news values - first published in the Journal of
International Peace Research in 1965 and reprinted in influential books edited by
Tunstall (1970), Cohen and Young (1973), and more recently by Tumber (1999) - has
long been regarded as the study of news values. For Bell (1991: 155), Galtung and
Ruge’s paper formed “the foundation study of news values”; Palmer (1998: 378)
described the study as the earliest attempt to provide a systematic definition of
newsworthiness; and, according to Tunstall (1970: 20), the 1965 paper promised “to
become a classic social science answer to the question ‘what is news?’” Tumber
(1999: 4) notes: “The relevance of Galtung and Ruge’s model is its predictive quality
in determining patterns of news.” Not that there was anything new about such news
values themselves. Indeed, it could be argued that they pre-date the mass media:
“Many of the factors which Galtung and Ruge find as predisposing foreign events to
become news - elite persons, negative events, unexpectedness-within-predictability,
cultural proximity - are also to be found in Shakespeare’s plays.” (Tunstall 1970: 21.)
More than three decades after the publication of their paper, Galtung and Ruge’s
study remains the “most influential explanation” of news values (McQuail 1994:
270). The names of the two Norwegians have become “as associated with news value
analysis as Hoover with the vacuum cleaner”, thanks to a study that was “a landmark”
in the scholarship of the media (Watson 1998: 117).

1
Galtung and Ruge looked at 1,262 press cuttings - including news items, features, editorials
and readers’ letters - concerning the crises in Congo 1960, Cuba 1960 and Cyprus 1964.

4/News values
Peterson, whose two studies on foreign news and international news selection looked
at journalistic input, found much to support the hypotheses put forward by Galtung
and Ruge. She conducted interviews with journalists on the Times and concluded:
“the results suggest strongly that news criteria shape a picture of the world’s events
characterised by erratic, dramatic and uncomplicated surprise, by negative or
conflictual events involving elite nations and persons.” (Peterson 1979 and 1981,
cited in McQuail 1992: 217.)
However, a number of shortcomings have been suggested in Galtung and Ruge’s
taxonomy of news values. As Tunstall points out, their paper concentrated on three
major international crises, ignoring day-to-day coverage of ‘lesser’ events; Galtung
and Ruge looked only at content that was explicitly concerned with the selected
crises; and their list of factors makes no reference to how visual elements, such as
dramatic photographs, can affect the content of written material. (Tunstall 1971: 21.)
One limitation of Galtung and Ruge’s gatekeeping approach is that it appears to
assume that there is a given reality ‘out there’ which the newsgatherers will either
admit or exclude (McQuail 1994: 270). As Seaton notes, such a focus on ‘events’
only tells us part of the story: “Many items of news are not ‘events’ at all, that is in
the sense of occurrences in the real world which take place independently of the
media.” (Curran and Seaton 1997: 277.) This point is taken further by Vasterman in
the context of a study of media-hypes like the ‘flesheating virus’ stories which swept
the UK (and elsewhere) during 1994. For Vasterman, lists of selection criteria such as
those discussed by Galtung and Ruge are flawed in their presumption that journalists
actually report events: “But news is not out there, journalists do not report news, they
produce news. They construct it, they construct facts, they construct statements and
they construct a context in which these facts make sense. They reconstruct ‘a’
reality.” (Vasterman 1995).
For Hall, applying a Marxist perspective after Gramsci and Althusser, while lists such
as Galtung and Ruge’s may help us to identify the formal elements within the
construction of news, they do not explain the ideological meanings behind such
‘rules’: “News values appear as a set of neutral, routine practices: but we need, also,
to see formal news values as an ideological structure - to examine these rules as the
formalisation and operationalisation of an ideology of news.” (Hall 1973: 235.) Taken
together, news values can be seen as a ‘structure’ or a ‘cultural map’ which journalists
use to help them make sense of the world (Hall et al 1978: 54).
From a semiotic perspective, Hartley agrees with Hall that focusing on news values
alone may disguise the ideological determinants of stories which appear in the media
(Hartley 1982: 80). He also points out that certain stories achieve copious coverage
apparently without fulfilling any of Galtung and Ruge’s news factors in any obvious
way, an issue which we discuss further in our findings below. Commenting on the
widespread reporting of a seemingly obscure academic dispute in the early 1980s,
Hartley comments: “The way the dispute was reported did exploit a number of our
news values (like personalisation, negativity, reference to elite persons and
institutions), but the news values themselves give little clue as to why the story was
deemed newsworthy in the first place.” (Hartley 1982: 79 - our emphasis.)
In this sense, then, while the news factors identified by Galtung and Ruge may
suggest a ‘predictive pattern’ of which events will and will not be reported - and may
inform us how stories may be treated - they do not provide a complete explanation of

5/News values
all the irregularities of news composition, including the influence of political and
economic factors (McQuail 1994: 271).

Alternative or additional news values

Following Galtung and Ruge’s taxonomy, there have been a number of alternative but
essentially similar lists of news values. In his study of US news media, Gans argues
that domestic news stories become ‘important’ by satisfying one or more of the
following criteria: rank in government and other hierarchies; impact on the nation and
the national interest; impact on large numbers of people; and significance for the past
and future (Gans 1980: 147-152). Similarly, stories are deemed ‘interesting’ if they
conform to one or more types which Gans lists as: people stories; role reversals;
human-interest stories; expose anecdotes; hero stories; and ‘gee-whiz’ stories (Gans
1980: 155-157).
Noting that the instinctual news value of most journalists is simply ‘does it interest
me?’, former Guardian editor Alastair Hetherington nonetheless drew up his own list
of news values during a study of the UK media. He argues that journalists look for
stories involving one or more of the following: significance; drama; surprise;
personalities; sex, scandal and crime; numbers; and proximity (Hetherington 1985: 8-
9). Herbert comes up with the following list: prominence; proximity; timeliness;
action; novelty; human interest; sex; humour (Herbert 2000: 318).
Rather than draw up an alternative list, Bell notes that Galtung and Ruge’s news
factors have been found both valid and enlightening in a number of different
countries. However, he augments their dozen factors with four more, all of which are
(like continuity and composition) concerned with news gathering and news
processing rather than with the events and actors featured in the news. Bell argues for
the importance to story selection of competition, the desire for a scoop; co-option,
whereby a story that is only tangentially related can be presented in terms of a high-
profile continuing story; predictability, that is, events which can be pre-scheduled for
journalists are more likely to be covered than events which turn up unheralded; and
prefabrication, meaning that the existence of ready-made texts (press releases,
cuttings, agency copy) which journalists can process rapidly will greatly increase the
likelihood of something appearing in the news (Gans 1991: 158-160).

4. Galtung and Ruge revisited: methodology

In the decades since the publication of their paper, Galtung and Ruge’s tentative
answers to the question ‘How do events become news?’ have become widely cited
and, indeed, often accepted with little further attempt at empirical research. We set
ourselves the task of devising a simple content analysis to help investigate just how
useful Galtung and Ruge’s factors are in analysing the news selection process today.
In other words, what is the relationship, if any, between the news that actually appears
in the press and the selection criteria discussed by Galtung and Ruge? To this end we
read and considered a total of 1,276 news articles published as page leads in UK
national newspapers in March 19992, attempting to identify which if any of Galtung

2
We considered every issue of the Daily Telegraph, the Sun and the Daily Mail published
during the randomly selected month of March 1999.

6/News values
and Ruge’s factors appeared to be present in each story. Content analysis itself -
defined by Berelson (1971: 18) as “a research technique for the objective, systematic,
and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” - is of course
a problematic area. We must therefore follow McQuail (1977) in prefacing our
findings with a health warning: “There is no objective or neutral way of deciding
which categories should be used.” This issue, and issues around Galtung and Ruge’s
own classification, are discussed in more detail below.
Whereas Galtung and Ruge began by suggesting a list of factors and then put forward
hypotheses - rather than beginning with an empirical study of what actually appeared
in newspapers - our exploration approached the issue from an altogether different
angle. Their concern was with events and how they did or did not become news. Our
concern has been with published news items and what may or may not have led to
their selection. As is discussed in the section on our findings below, many news items
appear to have little or no relation to actual events at all (as the term ‘event’ is
commonly understood). Indeed, how does one define an event, when journalists may
identify a series of what may be termed ‘mini-events’ within a larger story; or when
so many stories are based on issues, trends and even speculation rather than any
identifiable event?

The newspapers
We chose the three UK national daily newspapers which are the market leaders, in
terms of circulation, in their respective sectors3. The broadsheet Daily Telegraph,
owned by Conrad Black’s Hollinger Group, has an average daily sale of 1,022,937
(Press Gazette 21 January 2000). It has been described as having a “safely
conservative politics and approach to journalism”, although by the 1990s it had
“modernised itself stealthily and rather cleverly”. (Engel 1997: 248 and 306.)
The tabloid Sun, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News International empire, sells 3,395,273
copies a day and has been the biggest-selling UK newspaper for more than 20 years
(Press Gazette 21 January 2000). As James Curran notes, the Sun was reoriented
towards a mass working class readership following its purchase by Murdoch in 1969:
“It greatly increased its entertainment coverage, in particular human interest reporting
of show business and TV stars, developed a more explicit style of soft porn, and
shrank its coverage of public affairs. It evolved a complex editorial formula...which
was both hedonistic and moralistic, iconoclastic and authoritarian...” (Curran and
Seaton 1997: 93.)
The third title considered was the ‘middlebrow’ Daily Mail, owned by Associated
Newspapers and boasting an average daily circulation of 2,310,781 (Press Gazette 21
January 2000). It has been described by Engel as: “successful, professional,
respected, competitive, forceful, well-written and, in extremis, particularly during
elections, thoroughly mendacious.” (Engel 1997: 306.) It has also long been identified
with a successful strategy of targeting female readers (Holland 1998: 21).

3
We excluded Sunday newspapers as, in the UK at least, they generally have a less-news
driven agenda than do the dailies.

7/News values
At an overt party political level, both the Telegraph and the Mail have traditionally
been pro-Conservative newspapers, while the Sun switched from being a pro-Labour
title before Murdoch bought it in 1969 to become a champion of Thatcherism before
turning on the Tories after the 1992 General Election and backing Tony Blair’s
Labour Party shortly before Labour won a landslide victory in the 1997 election.
As we were concerned to explore specifically news values we focused on news items
to the exclusion of other content which Galtung and Ruge included in their sampling:
editorials, features and readers’ letters4. We chose to look at all news, not just foreign,
as, notwithstanding the narrow focus of their paper, Galtung and Ruge’s study has
become part of the canon of news values in general. For each news page in each issue
of the newspaper under consideration we analysed the content of the page lead or
most prominent news story5.

Problematic areas
Given that we were approaching Galtung and Ruge’s criteria from the perspective of
media texts rather than events, we recognised that there would be methodological
problems to be addressed. For example, when piloting our content analysis by
scouring news items for signs of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 factors, it quickly became
apparent that their factors could be identified on actual newspaper pages only with the
use of copious amounts of necessarily subjective interpretation on the part of the
researchers. Questions frequently thrown up included: ‘What is an unambiguous
event?’ and ‘Reference to something negative for whom?’ When dealing with
something as ‘opaque’ as news values (to use Hall’s term), it appears there can be
little escape from subjective interpretation. This, taken with McQuail’s warning cited
above, means that the figures included in this paper should be considered as, at best,
the broadly indicative findings of fallible human beings. Furthermore, even if it were
possible to correctly and objectively identify the factors within a news item, it would
not necessarily tell us why that story was selected over other potential stories
containing similar elements. Nor could it shed much light on whether factors such as
unambiguity or personification were intrinsic to the subject matter or simply how the
newspaper chose to write about it on that occasion.
Indeed, when applied in practice, each of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors become
problematic, as is indicated by the following examples of questions raised during our
research:
F1. Frequency: How does this relate to stories that are not about events at all, but
about trends, speculation, or even the absence of events?

4
Though we did find some blurring of the lines between news, features and comment pieces,
particularly in the Sun and Daily Mail.
5
It should be pointed out that broadsheet newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph have
more stories to the page, including very prominent stories which do not feature in our study
because they are not page leads. Therefore, its page leads form a lower proportion of its
overall news content. However, we decided to focus on page leads because their prominent
positioning in the hierarchy of news can be taken as reflecting the news values of the
journalists involved in selecting, sub-editing and editing stories on newspapers.

8/News values
F2. Threshold: Isn’t this still open to subjective interpretation? Which is bigger - 20
deaths in ten road accidents or five deaths in one rail crash?
F3. Unambiguity: Is the ambiguity in the subject or in the journalist’s interpretation?
F4. Meaningfulness: This is a slippery concept that changes over time and relies on
subjective interpretation.
F5. Unexpectedness: How can we tell if the journalist is simply taking an unexpected
angle on a predictable event?
F6. Consonance: How useful is this category if we can only guess if and when it has
applied?
F7. Continuity: Something may be in the news today because it was in the news
yesterday, but what does that actually tell us much about why it was news in the first
place?
F8. Composition: How can we know what was in the selector’s mind when making a
particular decision?
F9. Elite nations: The dearth of foreign news in UK tabloid newspapers renders this a
relatively infrequently identified factor; does that mean it does not apply?
F10. Elite people: How useful is a category that does not distinguish between the
Spice Girls and the President of the USA?
F11. Reference to persons: Is this intrinsic to the subject or the journalist’s technique?
F12. Reference to something negative: Negative for whom? Bad news for some might
be good news for others.
Of course, by its very nature, no content analysis - whether using Galtung and Ruge’s
factors or other formulations - can show us which possible news items were rejected
or not even noticed by the news selectors. Furthermore, as identified in our findings
below, there appear to be many stories published which feature news factors not
included in Galtung and Ruge’s list. However, none of this should be taken as
suggesting that Galtung and Ruge’s study is of no value today. Rather, the
methodological issues we have identified suggest that empirical research into news
selection raises at least as many questions as it answers. These are valid questions and
they need to be addressed - along with the tentative findings of ourselves and others -
rather than ignored in the belief that Galtung and Ruge have devised a comprehensive
set of news values.

5. Findings

The frequency that Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors appeared in the lead news
stories under consideration were as follows:

Total number of stories examined in

The Sun 344

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The Daily Mail 537
The Daily Telegraph 395

Total number of stories examined 1276

F3 Unambiguity 589
F10 Reference to elite people 588
F1 Frequency 472
F12 Reference to something negative 454
F11 Reference to persons 417
F7 Continuity 354
F6 Unexpectedness 276
F4 Meaningfulness: cultural proximity 220
F9 Reference to elite nations 213
F2 Threshold 173
F5 Consonance 109
F8 Composition 106

As discussed in the section on methodology above, these figures (along with the
tables and graphs published below) should be regarded as broadly indicative only,
relying as they do on the subjective interpretation of researchers. Nevertheless, the
figures merit some discussion, as they may be taken as indicating possible trends
within journalism as well as raising further questions over the applicability of Galtung
and Ruge’s news factors.

Galtung and Ruge’s news factors explored

F3 Unambiguity
It was no surprise to find that Unambiguity was identified most frequently, as we
were examining texts - the news product - rather than events themselves. Given that
journalists are trained to write the ‘intros’ to their news stories in an unambiguous
way, with a clear news angle in the first couple of sentences, it is perhaps inevitable
that so many news stories should appear unambiguous. As Table One suggests, the
Daily Mail particularly favours an unambiguous approach. Interestingly, we noted
many news stories that were written unambiguously about events and issues which

10/News values
were likely to have been highly ambiguous; NATO’s bombing of Serbia, for example,
or the implications of the UK Government’s Budget for the following year.

F10 Reference to elite people

This scored highly but the ‘elite’ people noted by us were not necessarily the elite
people that Galtung and Ruge had in mind. The UK press seems obsessed with
celebrities such as TV soap stars, sports stars, film stars and, of course, Royalty. In
contrast, the ‘elite people’ identified by Galtung and Ruge were the politically
powerful, people in positions of authority. As it stands, ‘elite people’ is too broad a
category to shed much light on what makes news in our current cultural climate. It
should also be noted there were many references to elite organisations or institutions,
such as the United Nations, the Vatican, Oxbridge, Eton and NATO and that this
factor could help make a story as newsworthy as could references to elite individuals.

F1 Frequency
A ‘common sense’ notion of news as information that is new would lead one to
expect this factor to score highly, and indeed frequency appears to be particularly
significant for the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. It is perhaps surprising that
this factor did not occur as a higher proportion of the total number of stories
examined. In contrast to the suggestion of Galtung and Ruge, many events became
news even when, on the face of it, they did not unfold at a frequency suited to
newspaper production. There were a number of stories that provided no clear
timescale of when the event/issue unfolded. This may have been deliberately
obscured because the news was not particularly contemporary, possibly due to the
parasitic nature of the media, with national papers picking up stories already
published in local newspapers some time ago. This was particularly true of the Sun,
which seemed to rate stories more on their entertainment value than on their
freshness.

F12 Reference to something negative

The old adage that ‘the only good news is bad news’ may not be literally true, but we
identified references to something negative in more than a third of the stories under
consideration. The Daily Mail appears to be particularly keen on negative or ‘bad
news’ stories. But this finding should be considered alongside the surprising amount
of ‘good news’ that all three newspapers reported. Positive stories included acts of
heroism, resourceful children, miracle recoveries, lucky escapes, happy anniversaries,
prize-winning, and triumphs over adversity. On some days, the number of positive
stories was almost equal to the number of negative stories: for example, the Sun on
10/3/99 carried four generally positive page leads, mostly welcoming Budget
proposals, as opposed to five page leads about something negative. It is possible that
‘good news’ items might feature even more prominently if all stories, rather than page
leads, were examined. However, there is a larger question here: bad news for whom?
The Daily Mail ran a number of stories presenting things as bad news which might be
seen by others as good news: the UK Government’s introduction of a statutory
minimum wage, for example, was presented as bad news for employers and
employees alike, when it could equally have been presented as good news for one or

11/News values
both sides of industry. Similarly, aspects of the Budget were presented in one paper
as good news and in another as bad news. A story may be presented as bad news
simply because this angle reflects that paper’s political stance or the perceived views
of its readers.

F11 Reference to persons

We would expect this factor to be prominent because journalistic training and
professional practice demands that the reporter seeks out the individual people
involved in events, either to provide human interest or to obtain quotes from all sides
involved (to present the story as an objective account). This factor was ranked as the
3rd most important for the Sun, the 5th for the Daily Mail, but only the 8th for the
Daily Telegraph, indicating that tabloid newspapers generally carry more human
interest stories and a great deal of their news is personalised.

F7 Continuity
This factor was not always easy to identify over a relatively short period and this may
explain why this is not higher, given that the media use other media as news sources
and competing media feel obliged to cover the same stories and issues. Continuity
may well have figured as a more important factor if features, editorials and letters had
been studied in addition to news stories.

F6 Unexpectedness
The rare event is rarer than might have been expected, possibly reflecting the fact that
much news gathering is routine, dominated by the news diary and by pre-arranged
events or ‘pseudo-events’, as more organisations become adept at the skills of news
management. The figures show a significantly greater number of Unexpected stories
in the Daily Mail than in the other two titles.

F4 Meaningfulness: Cultural Proximity and

F9 Reference to elite nations
The distinct lack of overseas news in the tabloids (on most days, the Sun and the
Daily Mail carried little or no foreign news) means that neither of these factors
showed up much in the overall study. As might have been expected, both factors were
considerably higher in the Daily Telegraph.

F2 Threshold
The relatively low position of this factor is surprising and reveals that newspapers do
not necessarily cover stories for the reasons that those outside the industry might
expect: because it affects large numbers of people or is considered ‘important’ in
some other way. We frequently found ourselves asking: ‘what is this story doing
here?’. To some extent, this might reflect a shift away from hard news. Certainly, all
three titles carried many stories of little apparent significance or amplitude,

12/News values
presumably because such stories were seen as entertaining or relating to the perceived
lifestyle of readers.

F5 Consonance and
F8 Composition
These two factors do not score highly, which is probably an indication that they have
less to do with events and more to do with news as process; therefore we were largely
left to speculate on the reasons behind the decisions of news selectors.

Those parts of the news that Galtung and Ruge didn’t touch
Exploring the news almost four decades after Galtung and Ruge, and with a focus on
domestic as well as foreign news, it came as no surprise that we identified a number
important news values which were not discussed by Galtung and Ruge. Furthermore,
in contrast to Galtung and Ruge’s starting point, our study has suggested that many
news stories are not related to events at all. We now turn to discuss these points of
difference before going on to draw up our own taxonomy of contemporary news
values.

Entertainment
Many stories were included, not because they provided serious information for the
reader, but apparently merely to entertain the reader. This proved to be a major factor,
particularly for the Sun (for example: ‘I had a beany baby: non-stop Heinz got me
pregnant, says mum Vicky’, Sun 16/3/99 p19). It should be noted that humorous and
entertaining articles, stories about sex, celebrities and Royalty - or stories which were
dramatic but of no apparent widespread social significance - were not confined to the
tabloids but were also prominent in the Daily Telegraph. This would appear to
support Franklin’s view about the tabloidisation of the broadsheets (Franklin 1997: 7-
10). However, it is fair to say that the range of news in The Telegraph was far greater
than in the middlebrow or tabloid papers, and that lighthearted stories were not
necessarily excluding hard news on its pages.
The following sub-categories help make up the entertainment package that now forms
a large part of news coverage.
a) Picture opportunities
If a story provided a good picture opportunity then it was often included even when
there was little obvious intrinsic newsworthiness. When combined with a top
celebrity or a Royal, the combination seemed to almost guarantee inclusion (for
example: ‘A love tonic for Anthea’, Daily Mail 26/3/99 p20-21). Related to the notion
of picture opportunities, stories featuring attractive women (often crime stories)
frequently appeared, complete with pictures, leading us to speculate about the number
of stories concerning other female victims of crime which had been ignored because
the individuals were not deemed attractive enough (for example: ‘Jealous lover who
killed film starlet is jailed for life’, Daily Telegraph 30/3/99 p19, which included a
huge semi-naked photograph of the victim). This would seem to support the findings
of a study published by the Women in Journalism group, that the criteria used to

13/News values
select pictures of women are different from those applied to men. Mary Ann Sieghart,
assistant editor of the Times, said she often heard the newsroom question: ‘Is she
photogenic?’ (Carter et al 1999.)6

b) Reference to sex
Continuing this theme, a large number of stories referred to sex (for example: ‘Twin-
city slicker and a tale of two blondes’, Daily Mail 16/3/99 p3; and ‘Wren ‘humiliated’
by superior’s sex banter’, Daily Telegraph 23/3/99 p6). Such stories often also
provide good picture opportunities. While sex may have been tangential to a story,
this angle was often emphasised and the story presented as one about sex, making sex
an important factor in contemporary news values.

c) Reference to animals
Animals also featured prominently, particularly in the Daily Mail and the Sun (though
by no means shunned by the Daily Telegraph). This often had the added advantage of
providing an appealing picture opportunity (for example: ‘Left behind with love, a
dying man’s best friend’, Daily Mail 18/3/99 p3; ‘Yappy landings: pup Annie falls
120ft off cliff and trots away’, Sun 18/3/99 p21; and ‘Spaniel has a spring in its step
after 250ft plunge’, Daily Mail 29/3/99 p38).

d) Humour
Humorous stories were popular with news selectors (for example: ‘Nutty Nick pays
£7,000 for gold gnashers’, the Sun 1/3/99). Very often these stories appear to have
little intrinsic newsworthiness in any conventional sense, and may not even be
particularly funny on the face of it, but they are written in a humorous style and
usually provide an opportunity for a sub-editor to produce a punning headline ( for
example: ‘Keep you hands off our Willey’, Sun 12/3/99 p3; ‘Fast Food: two wives
take a Damon Hill cardboard cut-out to dinner’, Sun 3/3/99 p3; ‘A game of chew
scarves: Andy nibbles souvenir to bring his footie team luck’, Sun 17/3/99 p3). In
this sense, Headline Opportunity might be said to be a factor in selecting a story for
the tabloids.

e) Showbiz/TV
Stories about TV stars, particularly those featured in soap operas and docusoaps, and
other celebrities were rife in the Sun, but all the papers carried more than their fair
share of stories about what can be described as showbiz (for example: ‘My new boy
and gel, by quiffmaster Beckham’, concerning footballer David Beckham’s latest
haircut, Daily Mail 29/3/99 p3; ‘Posh Spice gives birth to a baby boy’, Daily

6
Future research exploring a gendered critique of journalistic news values - and perhaps
even a gendered critique of the academic study of news values - may provide further insights
not discussed in this paper. The women’s editor of the Guardian claims: “News values are
still male values.” (Brooks 1999).

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Telegraph 5/3/99 p1, the same day as the Telegraph covered the marriage breakdown
of former Olympic swimmer and TV host Sharron Davies, p14). These stories, and
countless others like them, were covered on prime news pages; our study did not
consider features, TV sections or showbiz gossip pages. Related to this area is the
emergence of stories openly based on fiction, but presented as real-life, for example
news stories based on TV characters (not the actors) or on soap scenarios. For
example, the Sun carried a page on how the Budget would affect characters from
Coronation Street (10/3/99 p5) and a story on what happens on the wedding day of
another character from the same soap (6/3/99 p9). It is also worth noting that the Sun
often carried stories about TV that either explicitly or implicitly attacked or
undermined the BBC (for example: ‘BBC Nuked At Ten: ITV score huge hit as
millions tune in to new evening line-up’, Sun 15/3/99 p8). The same issue included a
story attacking a BBC docusoap, Jailbirds, and an editorial supporting this line and
urging readers to stick to ITV’s Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?

In addition to the above elements, which we have loosely categorised under the
heading Entertainment, there are two news factors discussed earlier.

Reference to something positive

Examples of this ‘good news’ factor include: ‘My £10 lifesaver: trainers’ rubber soles
kept electric shock boy alive’, Sun 30/3/99 p19; and ‘£3.8m win lets father fulfil a
pledge of love’, Daily Mail 31/3/99 p33.

Reference to elite organisations or institutions

As previously noted, the involvement of an elite organisation may generate news
coverage of an event which may have been ignored had it involved a non-elite
organisation (for example: ‘Eton’s killer game craze’, Sun 17/3/99 p4-5).

Agendas, promotions and campaigns

A final category of news not considered by Galtung and Ruge, but which our study
suggests is significant, is a newspaper’s own agenda. This could include the Sun’s
anti-BBC knocking stories cited above (which could be said to serve the commercial
interests of Rupert Murdoch). During the period under consideration, the Sun also ran
a prominent ‘Save our truckers’ campaign (complete with logo) featuring many
populist stories related to increases in the price of road tax and diesel (for example,
see the front page splash: ‘White van jam: tax demo to cripple capital’, Sun 18/3/99
p1). Promotions also play a part here, for example the Sun also had regular items
based on its own promotions such as Free Books for Schools, featuring news stories
about particular schools. Such stories appeared less because of any intrinsic news
value than because they served to promote commercial interests and/or reader loyalty
and identification. For its part, the Daily Mail featured a page lead with two
photographs plugging the Ideal Home Show, sponsored by none other than the Daily
Mail (‘Millennium dreams’, 18/3/99 p17). At the same time, the Daily Mail was
running a ‘Free Private Lee Clegg’ campaign, aimed at overturning the murder
conviction of a British soldier who shot dead a teenage girl in Northern Ireland.

15/News values
Thus, the Clegg story was given greater coverage in the Daily Mail (in terms of
column inches, prominence and continuity) than in other newspapers.

A hierarchy of values?
While, for the reasons discussed in the section on Methodology, we are not in a
position to demonstrate empirically a clear hierarchy of news values, our findings do
suggest that certain combinations of news values appear almost to guarantee coverage
in the press. For example, a story with a good picture or picture opportunity
combined with any reference to an ‘A-list celebrity’, Royalty, sex, TV or a cuddly
animal appears to make a heady brew that news editors find almost impossible to
resist.

6. Conclusion: Towards a contemporary set of news values

Our findings reinforce Tunstall’s concern that, by focusing on coverage of three major
international crises, Galtung and Ruge ignored day-to-day coverage of lesser,
domestic and ‘bread and butter’ news (Tunstall 1971: 21). In short, despite the way it
has been so widely cited, Galtung and Ruge’s taxonomy of news factors appears to
ignore the majority of news stories. Further, while the figures given above suggest
that news stories do frequently contain the factors identified by Galtung and Ruge,
our study adds weight to Seaton’s contention that many items of news are not reports
of events at all, but ‘pseudo-events’, free advertising or public relations spin. But
whereas Seaton is concerned at “the growth of organisations, professions and skills
aimed at manipulating the media”, our study suggests that the media itself may also
be responsible for the prominence of many apparently manufactured stories that have
little relation to actual events (Curran and Seaton 1997: 277-278). We find ourselves
agreeing with Hartley that, in contrast to some of the more mechanistic analyses of
newspaper content, we should be constantly aware that identifying news factors or
news values may tell us more about how stories are covered than why they were
chosen in the first place (Hartley 1982: 79). The same point may be made about the
useful additional factors suggested by Bell and discussed above: competition, co-
option, predictability and prefabrication (Bell 1991: 159-160).
For these reasons, and because of the problematic issues intrinsic to Galtung and
Ruge’s factors discussed above, it must be concluded that the much-cited Galtung and
Ruge list of news values should be regarded as open to question rather than recited as
if written on a tablet of stone. As, of course, should the set of contemporary news
values we will propose after a final consideration of the individual factors discussed
above.
A number of Galtung and Ruge’s factors appear to be problematic to identify while
others may be identifiable but less in any intrinsic properties of a potential news story
and more in the process of how a story has been constructed or written up. Examples
of the latter are Frequency and Unambiguity. Frequency of an event is often artificial

16/News values
today, reflecting how news can be created or managed by the public relations
industry. ‘Newness’, which is related to Frequency, appears to be more important for
‘hard’ news than for softer stories. It should also be remembered that journalists are
adept at selecting a particular issue or sub-event from an event as it unfolds, even
when it may unfold at an overall pace that does not coincide with newspaper
production. Similarly, most journalists are trained to write unambiguous angles to
stories that may be ambiguous, complex or unclear. It could be that Frequency has
become less important for newspapers as they are increasingly outpaced by electronic
media (McNair 1998: 179). If so, newspapers may more often be left to provide
background or analytical copy about a news event which has broken previously on
TV, radio or the Web; and/or that newspapers do not attempt to compete with
broadcasting, eschewing much hard news in favour of stories which entertain. For all
these reasons, we would not include either Frequency or Unambiguity in a
contemporary set of news values.
Certainly, Entertainment proved to be pervasive in all newspapers, though
particularly in The Sun where it was often dominant. This reinforces Bob Franklin’s
description of a prosaic perception of journalism that stresses the need for journalists
to entertain as well as inform: ‘The history of the British press, since the emergence
of popular journalism…has been a history of newspapers increasingly shifting its (sic)
editorial emphasis towards entertainment.’ (Frankin 1997: 72.) Therefore, no
contemporary set of news values is complete without an entertainment factor.
Some of Galtung and Ruge’s factors remain resonant today and can usefully be
incorporated, if worded slightly differently. Meaningfulness and Reference to Elite
Nations might be better subsumed into the wider category of Relevance to Readers.
This would include reference to culturally familiar countries that are not necessarily
elite nations (such as popular holiday destinations, Commonwealth countries or the
countries of significant immigrant groups in Britain ) and deal with the stories
perceived as being of interest and value to particular readership profiles (such as
parents, motorists, people with mortgages, etc).
Consonance and Composition could be incorporated into the category of the
Newspaper Agenda. The news selector may indeed be predicting or wanting
something to happen, but we would argue that this is related to the cultural,
commercial or political climate of their particular newsroom. The news selector will
be only too fully aware of a paper’s political stance and the perception of what regular
readers want from their newspaper. In some cases, the news selector may well be
required to go further and actively ‘manufacture’ the news stories that appear as part
of a paper’s campaign or promotion (stories that would not ordinarily be sought out or
noticed). Journalists may also be encouraged to write stories that undermine or attack
an employer’s economic rival, while promoting a proprietor’s economic interests,
such as anti-BBC stories in Murdoch’s Sun. Composition, as defined by Galtung and
Ruge, is related to their notion of Continuity. We prefer the category of Follow-up - a
term commonly used by journalists - which is more clearly defined as being the latest
development in or somehow related to a previous newsworthy story.
As discussed earlier, Galtung and Ruge’s category of Reference to Elite People is not
particularly useful as it stands, as it is taken to include everyone from Prime Ministers
to B-movie actors and Second Division footballers. We propose separate categories
referring to The Power Elite, which should include elite organisations and institutions

17/News values
as well as people, and Celebrities, meaning those who are already famous whether or
not they are powerful.
Galtung and Ruge included Reference to Persons, as they believed that many news
stories were ‘personified’. Indeed, as Schudson (1996: 153) points out, they
suggested that reporters write of persons and not structures, individuals and not social
forces, because western culture views individuals as ‘masters of their own destiny’
and that story-telling demands ‘identification’ amongst readers. But, while our study
of the UK press threw up plenty of ‘human interest’ stories which might satisfy this
need for identification, we did not find that most stories were personified in this way.
News stories often revolved around key organisations, issues and institutions. The
conventional journalistic practice of obtaining quotes meant that representatives of
such organisations would be quoted, but many stories were nevertheless not
personified in any meaningful sense. The categories of the Power Elite and Celebrity
satisfactorily cover many of those stories that do revolve around individuals, and we
would include Human Interest as a more precise sub-category of Entertainment:
stories which have no great social import but which are entertaining to read.
Galtung and Ruge’s concepts of Threshold and Unexpectedness remain useful
categories but could be better described as Magnitude and Surprise, the latter
category expanded to include unexpected contrasts.

News values: a contemporary set

Informed by our sampling of the UK press, by a review of the relevant literature, and
by our own practice as journalists, readers and academics, we tentatively propose the
following list of news values. Although there are exceptions to every rule, we have
found that news stories must generally satisfy one or more of the following
requirements to be selected:

1. The power elite

Stories concerning powerful individuals, organisations or institutions

2. Celebrity
Stories concerning people who are already famous

3. Entertainment
Stories concerning sex, showbusiness, human interest, animals, an unfolding drama,
or offering opportunities for humorous treatment, entertaining photographs or witty
headlines

18/News values
4. Surprise
Stories which have an element of surprise and/or contrast

5. Bad news
Stories with negative overtones such as conflict or tragedy

6. Good news
Stories with positive overtones such as rescues and cures

7. Magnitude
Stories which are perceived as sufficiently significant either in the numbers of people
involved or in potential impact

8. Relevance
Stories about issues, groups and nations perceived to be relevant to the audience

9. Follow-ups
Stories about subjects already in the news

10. Newspaper agenda

Stories which set or fit the news organisation’s own agenda

The news values in daily application by tens of thousands of journalists may indeed
be opaque, as suggested by Hall (1973: 181). We offer this study, and our proposed
contemporary set of news values, as a contribution to the process of making news
values more transparent. Future research may help shed more light on how effective
our list of news values is in rendering news selection a more transparent and better
understood process.7

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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7
Although this study has focused on the UK national press, it would be illuminating to
compare our findings with the categorisation of news values operating at local, regional and
international levels; and in broadcasting and online media as well as print.

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TABLES AND GRAPHS:

Table One to be included in Section 5 on Findings - others to be printed separately as
an Appendix.

Captions:
Table One: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of three UK national newspapers published during March
1999.
Table Two: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of the Sun published during March 1999.
Table Three: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of the Daily Mail published during March 1999.
Table Four: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of the Daily Telegraph published during March 1999.
Graph One: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of three UK national newspapers published during March
1999.
Graph Two: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of the Sun published during March 1999.

21/News values
Graph Three: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of the Daily Mail published during March 1999.
Graph Four: Identification of Galtung and Ruge’s 12 news factors in lead stories on
the news pages of the Daily Telegraph published during March 1999.

(8,324 words - not counting the bibliography or the captions)

28/1/2000

22/News values