News Values from an Audience Perspective

This book focuses on journalistic news values from an audience perspective. The audience influences what is deemed newsworthy by journalists, not only because journalists tell their stories with a specific audience in mind, but increasingly because the interaction of the audience with the news can be measured extensively in digital journalism and because members of the audience have a say in which stories will be told. The first section considers how thinking about news values has evolved over the last fifty years and puts news values in a broader perspective by looking at news consumers’ preferences in different countries worldwide. The second section analyses audience response, explaining how audience appreciation and ‘clicking’ behaviour informs headline choices and is measured by algorithms. Section three explores how audiences contribute to the creation of news content and discusses mainstream media’s practice of recycling audience contributions on their own social media channels.

1. Introduction: News Values from an Audience Perspective.- 2. The Bad News and The Good News About News.- 3. News Values in Audience-Oriented Journalism. Criteria, Angles, and Cues of Newsworthiness in the (Digital) Media Context.- 4. News Values and Topics: A 15-Nation News Consumer Perspective.- 5. Analyzing News Values in the Age of Analytics.- 6. Raising Clickworthiness: Effects of Foregrounding News Values in Online Newspaper Headlines.- 7. ‘We Would Never Have Made That Story’: How Public-Powered Stories Challenge Local Journalists’ Ideas of Newsworthiness.- 8. From Newsworthiness to Shareworthiness: Understanding Local News Value Judgements through an Ethnographic Study of Hyperlocal Media Facebook Page Audiences.- 9. Facebook Status Messages as Seductive and Engaging Headlines: Interviews with Flemish Social Media News Editors.