News Values Revisited: A Comparison Between Citizen and Mainstream Media in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

News values is a research topic that has received extensive attention in the scholarship. However, previous studies have not widely examined news values in the context of Citizen Journalism. Drawing on Harcup and O’Neill’s (2017. “What is News?: News Values Revisited (Again).” Journalism Studies 18 (12): 1470–1488) contemporary news values model, this study employs a content analysis of 420 Citizen Journalism and mainstream news lead articles in Hong Kong media, collected respectively from the local outlets StandNews and MingPao. The results show that Citizen Journalism publication StandNews tends to adopt and make similar use of news values to the mainstream MingPao in publishing its articles, which suggests that in Hong Kong, Citizen Journalism is increasingly closing the gap with mainstream media in terms of the editorial decisions that lead to the publication of news stories and, more in general, in terms of newsworthiness. This study intends to contribute to the comprehension of how news values compare between Citizen Journalism and mainstream news outlets, and therefore whether Citizen Journalism presents traits of newsworthiness.

KEYWORDS:

• News values
• journalism
• mainstream media
• citizen media
• content analysis
• news

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tetsuro Kobayashi, Michael Prieler, and the reviewers for their precious and constructive feedback. We are especially grateful to our research assistant, Wyman Lee, for his contribution to the coding process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chun Hong Tse

Chun Hong Tse is a master’s student at the School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests focus on journalism with a particular emphasis on citizen journalism, computer mediated communication, and political communication.

Roberto Spiezio

Roberto Spiezio is Assistant Professor at the International College, Journalism and Mass Communication Program, Ming Chuan University, Taiwan. His research interests include comparative media representation of socio-cultural phenomena, health communication, and citizen journalism.