KEY POINTS

• News values – the qualities that make a news item “newsworthy” – become embedded in text and govern practice.

• News values “shape texts” by providing decision-making parameters, limiting the scope of possibility.

• News values are agreed to in the abstract, as a list of motivations for coverage decisions, but are interpreted differently across publications and editors and through time.

• News values look different from the inside vs. the outside: a reporter's list varies from an outsider's.

Why does a monsoon in India that kills thousands of people get buried on Page Z99 when a meteorological threat of a lesser degree in the next county gets A1 play and plenty of television broadcast time? Why in US papers do the politics of Eastern Europe get less attention than the decision of the local zoning committee? What counts as news? What makes a story newsworthy? Newsworthiness is determined by a set of simple factors or “news values” that include proximity, impact, change, prominence, conflict, timeliness, usefulness, and the unusual. News values function as guidelines for decision-making and are invoked, unconsciously or explicitly, at every step of the news process. News values are one of the most important practice-based and ideological factors in understanding the focus and shape of news stories and the decisions of journalists.