In 1965 analytical research was undertaken by two media researched, Galtung and Ruge. This research was conducted to find out what factors news stories contained that deemed them news-worthy. Those that ticked all the right boxes were the ones most likely to reach the top of the news agenda.
It was found that the size or threshold of the story was important the bigger, more violent and more people it affected the more newsworthy it was.
Proximity Relevance, people are always more interested in stories that are close to home, affect people they know or the area they know, stories need to be carefully considered as to how meaningful they will be to the reader.This is why when a plane crashes in say Australian it is always reported in such a way to include the number of Brits that lost their life.
Stories that carry theme or continuity and will most certainly contain new leads in the coming days or weeks are of great interest. Also if a story is deemed valuable it could be in the paper for weeks without anything new happening purely because it is currently important.
Unexpected stories such as scandals and unique points of view will always sell, especially if they are light hearted quirky and simplistic to read. Or just simply different to expectations, “Man bites dog,” will always get people talking over, “dog bites man.”
Any story that is told though people will push stories higher up the agenda the human interest angle is an easy way for the readers to relate to a story. This can be however taken to the extreme if it uses either the elite or anyone with celebrity status. If the celebrity was taken from the equation how important is their latest shopping trip?
Bad news sells so anything that causes disaster or death will sell, possibly because of morbid fascination or possibly the “lucky it wasn’t them” factor.
All of these factors fulfill reader expectations either though formal composition of what they expect to see and how they expect something to be presented to them, this even goes for the unexpected elements people are hungry for information they find quirky and different people look for a talking point and of course a reassurance that life isn’t as bad they thought.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment