Joy is a News Value

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes that journalism scholars adopt joy as an explicit news value and adjust their epistemological and methodological approaches to news accordingly. Establishing that normative conceptions and practices of news tend toward the negative, the paper upends what journalism should privilege—reorienting the minds of journalists and audiences toward affective characteristics of people and events that evoke well-being, delight, and courage. Naming joy as a news value means recognizing the contingent and constructed nature of existing news values, embracing the “affective turn” foregrounding emotion and feeling in media research, and conceiving joy as a deep and resonant approach to life’s challenges—not just a “feel-good” distraction. The paper offers proof-of-concept cases locating journalism along joyful dimensions of perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. It concludes with a methodological proposition that studying an affective value such as joy calls for our own affective engagement with news.

KEYWORDS:

• affect
• emotion
• ethics
• humanities
• journalism
• joy
• news values

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to Lynn Fendler, who opened me to the idea that a study like this was possible, and to John Besley, whose relentless encouragement helped make it real. I also thank the journal editors and reviewers for their intellectual generosity in supporting this effort.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 There is a chapter on love – mostly love for Donald Trump, which works around joy’s darker edges.